


Now I Can See the Moon

by dovetail



Category: Ghost of Tsushima (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Past, Dubious Morality, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Post-Game(s), The death of friendship casts a long shadow, except Ryuzo survives, it is pretty dark, remember jin has no honor, with a touch of Break-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:42:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 65,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26203624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dovetail/pseuds/dovetail
Summary: "I have only one left." Jin sat down by the hearth at Ryuzo’s side and opened the gourd. "Kii brewery."He drank some of the sake before offering it to Ryuzo."You drink with traitors?" Ryuzo asked, accepting it nonetheless.
Relationships: Ryuzo/Jin Sakai
Comments: 75
Kudos: 115





	1. Komoda Beach

**Author's Note:**

> _'Barn's burnt down --  
>  now  
> I can see the moon.'_  
>   
> Mizuta Masahide  
>   
> 

It had been a while since Jin had last gone to Komoda Beach. 

He used to steer well clear of that place, besides that one time when Lady Masako had gone there looking for her sons and he had followed to make sure she was all right. The stench of the decomposing bodies there, including of people he had known well, the half-eaten body parts strewn around by wild animals, the sand darkened by blood that he could remember having been that sickening _paste_ during the battle, sticking to everything when the blood had been fresh, the carcass of his own horse with wide open eyes. All of that was terrible beyond comprehension. 

And he had had no need to look at it more than once. 

Then, when the island had been cleared of the Mongols enough for the work of burying the dead to start, he went to the growing gravesite there a few times to pay his respects, always around the time of sunset, wearing dark clothes and hiding his face. The Ghost was being hunted by the shogunate by that point, but at that hour, with the men who had been digging the graves and transporting bodies finishing their work for the day and meeting in groups to talk amongst themselves in hushed voices, and with the gaze of those who had come to mourn the dead drawn toward the horizon and the setting sun, he could walk in the long shadows between the graves without drawing too much attention to himself. 

Then he stopped spending as much time in Izuhara and months passed until he had another opportunity to travel to Komoda Beach.

He arrived in the early morning, after a night spent on horseback. The last few days had been time he had set aside for rest before heading back north and he planned to set off later in the day, after he was done here.

He climbed onto the rocks high above the beach. The area below him was covered with hundreds of graves at this point, uniform mounds of sand with tattered sashimono banners scattered between them. Somewhere below, a man was sitting and playing the flute, the wistful melody carried by the wind toward the sea. There was not much activity at the gravesite this early in the day and just a handful of women were already there. He didn’t plan on going down there himself. There were not enough shadows for him to hide at this hour.

The sound of the arrow approaching him from behind was loud and clear to him in the morning air but he had no sword in his hand to deflect it with, no time to draw one, and while he tried to get out of its way entirely, it still sank into his shoulder blade, knocking him down to his knees. He grit his teeth to stop himself from screaming and got back to his feet immediately. When he turned his head to look at the arrow, it was a Mongol one. That was surprising, considering most of the Mongols were gone at this point, but better than if it was Japanese. Mongols he could just slice up, but if this were samurai...

His hand went to the hilt of his katana on its own. How come they dared to advance all the way here at this point, he thought, with almost all of them gone. 

“Stay still or I’ll shoot you in the head,” the voice that shouted these words at him as he started moving was painfully familiar and it was that fact more than anything else that stopped him from drawing his sword in the end.

Footsteps followed. It was just one person, he thought, circling around him in such a way as to approach him from the back.

He threw a smoke bomb under his own feet. No further arrows came, so in the resulting smoke he moved behind the attacker, drawing his tanto on the way, and with it pointing outwards in his hand, was ready to stab the man through the heart from behind. 

His legs were kicked out from under him at the last moment but he steadied himself in time and only fell on one knee. The arrow stuck in his back grated on something and he had to grit his teeth harder. The man took a few steps forward, away from him, with his back still to him and got out of range of his tanto. Jin sheathed it and drew his sword instead, getting back to his feet at the same time. Had it been a Mongol, he would have struck him across the back and been done with it.

“Face me,” he called out, because it wasn't.

The man continued standing there with his back to him, holding a Mongol bow in one hand. He was wearing a straw hat. And he carried a sword as well but he wasn't drawing it. Did he want to die, Jin wondered.

“You don’t really want to fight me here, do you?” the man asked, turning around to face him. “This place has seen enough bloodshed as is. We’ve both been there.”

There was no way, Jin thought, looking at the man. That arrow must have been poisoned. And in reality he was writhing on the ground vomiting blood right about now. He was probably going to die in this place after all. And even when he did, at this point, he was not going to get a proper grave here, among the others, with a Sakai banner flapping in the wind over it.

“Ryuzo,” he let the name slip off his tongue even though he knew it couldn't really be _him_. Jin's memory of plunging his tanto into him after their fight at Castle Shimura was fresh and raw in his mind.

He could see his katana shaking in front of his eyes as if his hands belonged to someone else and he did his best to steady his hold but couldn't even do that. He could feel a rivulet of blood flowing down his spine from the arrow wound.

“I need to talk to you,” the man said. 

He looked very much like Ryuzo, Jin thought, though his face was half-hidden under a straw hat, identical to the one Ryuzo used to wear as the Straw Hat Ronin and that Jin still had at his hideout. 

“We have talked already,” Jin said, arriving at the decision that whatever this was, he could at least try to kill it.

The man took his sword in the scabbard into his hand and threw it at Jin’s feet. He put his hands up, one still holding the bow. Jin remembered how the last time around, Ryuzo had initially refused to fight him, too, in a similar fashion. 

“Pick up that sword,” he called out, his own katana at the ready.

“Sit down with me,” the man said. “Before you draw someone’s attention to us.”

Jin didn’t budge. Even if that was a real possibility.

The man moved his hand and Jin made a half-step toward him immediately, but all the man did was reach for his hat and push it to his back, revealing his face. A shudder went down Jin's spine when their eyes met because the previous time he’d been looking Ryuzo in the eye, Ryuzo's eyes had been gradually growing dull and lifeless and Jin had let his body slide down to the floor of Castle Shimura without even closing them for him because he couldn't bear to do that and then he'd gone away with his arm covered in Ryuzo’s blood, _way too much of it_ , with the one upside to the finality of that act being that he was never going to have to kill his oldest friend again.

“Pick up the sword,” he said again, but all the man did was throw his bow on top of it.

But Jin needed him to fight. Because it seemed like the only way to make this situation bearable.

The blood from his arrow wound was starting to drip onto the ground now.

Nothing more was happening and they were just standing there, facing each other, until Jin finally moved and took the three steps to the katana lying on the ground between them, with his own sword at the ready, crouched down to pick it up and walked backward with it in his hand. Looking down at its scabbard, adorned with the silver fox, he felt a jolt of familiarity. And he remembered something that might have as well happened in a whole different world, where that katana had been lying by the goza mat on which he'd been splayed out, with Ryuzo halfway on top of him and one sake gourd shared between the two of them.

He sheathed his own sword then and walked back to the edge of the cliff overlooking the beach with the graves, holding the other katana in its scabbard in his hand. The man joined him a moment later and Jin didn’t even need to look at him any more closely to know that it was Ryuzo, he could tell just by how it felt to have him by his side again. He sat down, facing the beach and the sea, and put the other katana in his lap. He ran his fingers over the scabbard while gathering his resolve. Then he braced himself and pulled the arrow out from his back. It was not necessarily what should be done and he was aware of that but it had also been how he'd been dealing with arrows in places such as this, where pulling the arrow out was not going to right out kill him, during the war. The pain almost made him fall over but he got a hold of himself. Breathing deeply through his nose, he threw the arrow away. Then he looked up at the sky over the beach. It was clear and huge.

He was sitting like that for a long time, waiting for the pain to subside to a more manageable level. Facing whatever that man was didn’t feel urgent to him at all somehow and he hoped that he might just go away.

But the man spoke up instead.

"Here," he said, forcing a clean looking piece of cloth into Jin's hand. "Just sitting there won't help it."

Jin accepted it hesitantly but held it to the wound in the end. He could feel it become soaked with blood.

“You think I’m a ghost,” the man said. "But I’m one only to the same extent as you.”

“I'm alive. And you're dead. Because I killed you." 

“Just like the Mongols killed you on this beach.” The man motioned to the graves at their feet.

Ryuzo had not known how close he'd come to death at Komoda, Jin thought. Though he could probably imagine.

“What do you want?” Jin asked, hoping that once that was done, the man was going to be gone.

“I’m not sure what I want. But we’ve backed ourselves into a corner."

Why here of all places, Jin thought, looking at the graves on the beach below them. Ryuzo hadn't died here. He might have, they both might have, but hadn't.

"How does it feel," the man spoke up, "O Slayer of the Khan, to rid this island of Mongols only for someone else to take it right away?"

“It doesn’t matter who takes it as long as it is at peace."

A few weeks ago, there had been just one Mongol camp left on all of Tsushima, not far from Komoda, actually. The only other Mongols left were hiding on the ships docked around the coast. If there were any more than that, Jin didn't know about them but either way there couldn't be many left of them. And as if prompted by that near-final victory, new samurai started arriving from the mainland. It wasn’t just clan Oga anymore, but just like Jin’s uncle had told him before their duel, new clans arriving to replace the old ones, marching on roads with their sashimono banners, setting up camps and taking over barracks and residences. 

A new family had moved into the Sakai estate as well and after dealing with that last Mongol camp, Jin sneaked up to see what they had made of it. Observing the four children playing in the garden from the top of the cedar tree he himself used to climb as a child, Jin realized that he didn’t mind their chatter. And he doubted Yuriko’s spirit, which might have been still around, would have minded either.

It was that kind of moment, he thought. A new beginning. And it almost seemed appropriate to write a death poem about that cedar tree and the chatter and having lost everything, his parents, his comrades, his best friend, his uncle, his honor, his clan, his home, and commit suicide to put himself out of the picture, now that the Mongols had been defeated. That kind of moment when a vengeful spirit retreats back into the bloodied sand. And he would have come here, to Komoda Beach, to do it.

Except it wasn’t just about him.

"The Mongols always said the same thing," Ryuzo said. "The Great Peace. It doesn't matter how it came about or who it benefits, it's still peace. But it's just what you're saying. Because you're not really ready to pay the price for a peace like that. What would you tell your new friends? To give themselves up and get executed? Like you told me? Just looking at the banners they're carrying, the mainland sent six clans here, on top of Oga. And we only had five in total. They’ll go both for Yarikawa and the Cedar Temple lands. And you will have to fight them. And Yarikawa today is Jogaku in twenty years, with you, sitting inside, still undefeated. Or you could take more than that.”

"If you were still alive, I'd say you smelled opportunity."

"The people are questioning why there are new clans coming at all when someone connected to each of the original five but Kikuchi survived. You're all war heroes at that. You could take the whole island, if only the jito wasn't so lacking in flexibility. But you're conveniently his heir and not everyone understands that you no longer are, so if something were to happen to him…"

“I already duelled him. And I let him live after I'd won.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“There will be no great civil war. Again. If I can help it.”

“Then what will it be?”

Jin grew silent.

“You’re not going to ask me how I survived, are you?” Ryuzo asked.

“You didn't. Nobody survives getting cut open."

“It's still a good story. And you were also thrown in jail immediately after fighting me and then you fled without looking back once. You couldn’t have known that your uncle's men had never recovered my body.”

Jin hadn't heard about that, no, and maybe his uncle wouldn’t have deemed it important enough to tell him, since they had only talked once since. But it was still impossible.

He knew that his own sanity was shaky at this point, after everything that he'd been through, and he had barely slept in months. It was not unreasonable to assume he was seeing things.

"There was this woman with the Mongols at Castle Shimura," Ryuzo started talking and Jin thought immediately how he'd never seen a single Mongol woman, not in all this time. "Whatever they called her, let’s just call her the Witch. She must have been older than all of them combined. They had taken her with them from the continent because she treated their wounded. She was a smart one, too. She had picked up some Japanese even before I met her. The Khan had left her behind on the night we had fought, but she didn’t drink your poison. She took me with her when she escaped the castle with her men, from right under Lord Shimura's nose, while he was busy arguing with you and nursed me back to health while travelling between their camps. Thankfully, we never encountered you. She sometimes called me a demon. She was an old hag with her brain half-rotten from breathing in juniper fumes and she thought that you poisoning everyone that night was some kind of a sign. I didn't argue with her. I couldn't understand most of what she was saying anyway. And I was weak for a very long time. She had things that dulled the pain, at least until the storm at Izumi Bay destroyed the Mongol fleet and the transports from the continent stopped. Then she no longer had anything to treat anyone with. But I pulled through. She, on the other hand, died. She must have been keeping herself alive with some kind of magic potion from the continent as well. The Mongols were mourning her for weeks. And now that there are no more Mongol camps, they are starving hidden inside their ships. There are no big ones anymore. They all withered down to nothing. And they have nowhere to go. They will all die, even if you don't do a thing. But for me, it was time to leave.”

“You are a traitor, even to them."

"You are a traitor yourself. The announcement hangs on the walls all over Tsushima for everyone to read.”

Jin's hand tightened around the scabbard of the katana in his lap. Whatever the shogun, his uncle or Lord Oga thought, he had never betrayed his people. Never would.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “You sided with the enemy.”

“And you’ve become the enemy of the state yourself.”

"What do you want from me?" There was no point arguing, Jin thought.

"Give me a second chance," Ryuzo said right away, as if he was so sure he still _deserved_ one.

"I already gave you one. After we fought at Castle Kaneda. And you didn't take it. You called guards on me."

The wind picked up and made the sashimono banners on the beach flap louder.

"It was before you rid me of my men,” Ryuzo said.

“We had this conversation before.”

Jin didn't need to hear it all again. And if it was his own conscience tormenting him with faults in his thinking, he knew there hadn’t been any.

“I know you can never forgive me for that man who was killed by the Khan," Ryuzo continued. "I know he was the Thief’s brother. But I was not the one who cut off his head. You, on the other hand, slaughtered my men with your own two hands, a whole army of them. You _poisoned_ some of them. We should be about even.”

“I only poisoned those who attacked my ancestral home. Because you told them about it. And Yuriko was still living there at the time."

"Because if I hadn't told them, they couldn't have found your estate on their own, right?"

"They were all traitors, Ryuzo. They deserved to die."

“They went to the Mongols because they had been starving. And they thought that it would be easy for us to take that bounty on your head. You were just one samurai, after all. Past a point, I couldn't talk them out of it.”

“And I never held you responsible for what they did."

That had been totally besides the point, Jin thought. If the Straw Hats had sided with the Mongols, so be it, it just meant that he had had to take even more lives, but when he put the Ghost mask on, it didn't _matter_ how many there were to kill anyway. 

He had had some sympathy for the Straw Hats at first, right after he'd learned that Ryuzo had become their new leader. He used to like their camp, with the singing, and the stories by the fires, but Ryuzo hadn’t wanted him to spend any more time there than had been strictly necessary, because he couldn't bear the thought of them becoming his followers. But maybe if they had, they wouldn't have gone to the Mongols and they wouldn't have had to die.

"It was never about them," Jin said. "It was about you. You should have left them when they sided with the enemy. Not gone and helped the Khan yourself. I thought you were the kind of man who would. If you just showed up alone to fight alongside me at Castle Kaneda, I would have been so glad."

“If I came to you, I’d have to kill my men off one by one by your side. And you're refusing to kill samurai yourself. But you expected me to turn against my own kind.”

“People don't come in kinds. We were friends. And you should have sided with your country. Not the invaders. When your men were in the wrong."

“Your uncle was in the wrong, too. At least according to you. And yet he lived past his encounter with the Ghost. A privilege lowly ronin don't get, right? 'People don't come in kinds'."

"My uncle is my family."

"And I was your…"

"What?"

\---

Dressing up as girls to escape the castle was the stupidest idea. Which was precisely what had made it so good. 

Jin could leave at any moment he wanted, just by going out the window, over the roofs, down the castle walls and the rocks below them. But Ryuzo couldn't. There was a point on top of these walls, with the void stretching down below his feet over the waterfall, that made him nauseous and unwilling to ever follow Jin down any further. Jin’s trust in his hold on the wall and the rocks and his luck not to fall was impressive, but Ryuzo didn’t have what it took himself.

So since they wanted to go out together to escape the grueling training and study for a day, dressing up as female servants was the plan they had come up with. They had secured some women’s clothing from the servant girls by giving them some of their better food and promising to wash the clothes for them thoroughly after use. 

The clothes they'd gotten worked better on Jin, who was smaller and didn’t have such wide shoulders, but they still both looked abysmally bad. Big, ugly girls. They smeared their faces with sooth to be less recognizable and somehow still walked past the guards at the gate with an empty hand cart without them sparing them a single glance. Apparently, nobody stared too hard at servant girls. At least the unattractive ones.

“Where do we go now?” Ryuzo asked once they had put some distance between themselves and the castle and had hidden the hand cart in the bushes to get it out of the way.

“Hot spring in the woods?” Jin suggested right away.

And Ryuzo should have expected that answer from him. Jin liked nothing better than soaking in hot springs, which was a curious choice for someone as restless and unable to sit still otherwise as him.

“First to the river then,” Ryuzo said. 

“Yeah," Jin agreed and followed him on the road into the woods, the dress he was wearing rustling in the grass.

It was a beautiful summer morning. The last remnants of fog were dissipating over the fields and once they approached the forest, a fox ran across their path and stopped in the grass to look at them before fleeing.

"That's a good sign, isn't it?" Ryuzo spoke up. "Maybe your uncle won't realize we are gone. What do you think he would do if he did?"

"My uncle's the jito. He has other things to worry about than us.”

“You’re sure of that? He devotes an awful lot of his time and attention to you.”

“Because I’m his heir.”

“At least for now, right?”

“Don’t start.”

Ryuzo _liked_ to rile Jin up over the possibility of the jito having sons of his own again to call his heirs instead of him. He liked to remind him of the precariousness of his situation. Precisely because his own was so much worse. He had been a childhood friend of Jin’s, a commoner who didn't even know who his own father was, and he had been allowed to play with Jin only because Jin was an only child and had no cousins anymore and there were no samurai children for him to play with anywhere nearby, with the Adachis' sons living a full day of travel away being the closest. It had always been supposed to be a temporary thing. But then Jin’s mother passed away and his father couldn’t bear to make them stop being friends, even as Jin got older. Instead he had them both start military training. And then he too died. Which was not only a life-changing blow to Jin. Ryuzo had always imagined throughout his younger years serving as a retainer under Jin’s father eventually. And with his natural choice of a master gone, he too had been set on his future path. Lord Shimura took them both to his castle because at the time Ryuzo was already showing promise with the sword and the bow, and maybe Jin had asked for it, which was the part of it Ryuzo chose not to think about, but in the end, he was no one, while Jin, regardless of what was going to happen with Lord Shimura's legacy, was still Lord Sakai in his own right.

“You know, Jin,” Ryuzo spoke up once they reached the river. “You don't look so bad as a girl.”

Jin snorted. He was already washing the soot off his face.

“I’m not sure if I should be offended,” he said.

Despite it being the middle of summer, the water in the river was chilly this early in the morning when Ryuzo dipped his fingers into it. They were alone deep in the woods, no settlements or fields anywhere in sight. A perfect day, away from the constant noise of Castle Shimura, the hum of the voices, the prying eyes, the smoke from fires burning at all times, even in the warmest weather.

“Hurry up,” Jin called out to him from the water.

He had already stripped and jumped into the river. He must have been cold, Ryuzo thought, submerged fully like that, but it didn’t seem to bother him at all.

Back then, Jin still used to look somewhat fragile. But he was nothing but, to the extent that left Ryuzo bewildered sometimes. There was no height he wouldn’t jump off, as long as there was a body of water below, no tree or wall too high for him to climb, no water too cold for him to swim in or too hot to submerge himself into and no amount of beating that he couldn’t just take and come back the next day to knock his bullies’ teeth out. Ryuzo had offered to help him with those back when they had been at their most persistent but there had been no need. And deep down, Ryuzo was happy to be on Jin's good side. Because he never wanted that ferocity turned against him.

He stripped reluctantly, anticipating the cold, even though being naked felt better than wearing the restrictive clothes the girls had lent them, too small for him in half the places. The water in the river was bone chilling when he got into it. But with Jin swimming around freely there was no other choice but to submerge himself fully, too.

He got out after only a moment and stood at the river’s edge, letting the sun dry him. When Jin followed him out of the water, his skin was covered in goosebumps and his lips had a bluish tinge.

"Too cold for you?" Jin still asked defiantly, while doing his best to stop himself from shaking.

"With the way you look, too cold for you as well."

"I'm fine," Jin said, even as he wrapped his arms around himself.

And Ryuzo found himself looking back to his trembling lips. And the sight sent his blood rushing to the one part of his body where he didn't need it while standing naked in front of Jin.

But all he could think about were all the other times he had been staring at him. All the times he'd watched Jin train, eat, sleep, unaware of what he had been doing to him while at it. Beautiful when he fought, like no other guy at the castle, eye-catching with his clothes and armors that were much more elegant than those of commoner recruits and retainers' sons, for obvious reasons. Also, untouchable. Absolutely out of the question.

Ryuzo had had his fair share of adventures at the castle already. The girls there were much more worldly than in the countryside. They knew how not to get pregnant and what to do if they did and were more open to doing pretty much anything. A lot of them liked him without him even trying and he had had fun with them but it never really helped him ease the tension he felt around Jin. 

“What's wrong?" Jin asked him in the end.

What was wrong was that Ryuzo was becoming hard and he didn't know how to stop it other than by plunging back into that icy cold water. Nothing Jin could help him with. 

He took a step back toward the river, but for some reason Jin moved as well, the water droplets glistening on his body as he approached. And then he did something he absolutely shouldn’t have done. He looked down and he talked.

"Thinking of something nice?" he asked, not sounding too sure of himself at all, though Ryuzo would have sworn that he was actually attempting to flirt with him.

The mere possibility made him dizzy with excitement.

It could still be explained away and Ryuzo weighed his options, looking Jin in the eye. It seemed to him that he saw something like anticipation there. Jin wasn’t stupid. He might have _known_.

Ryuzo took a deep breath. He wanted to just have it behind him as well. Because it had been _months_.

"I'm thinking of you, Jin."

Jin's eyes darkened even past their usual black at his words and Ryuzo felt lost about what that meant. Expecting a blow, he took his chance and grabbed Jin first. 

His erection poked Jin's stomach when he pulled him close. And Jin didn't really oppose it, not to the extent he probably could have, which spurred Ryuzo on to grab the back of his head and kiss him, smashing their cold lips together. 

Jin's lips, staying firmly pressed together, warmed up under his after a while. As did his skin where Ryuzo held him. And it actually took a long time. The kind of time Ryuzo would have never devoted to any girl who refused to open her mouth into a kiss.

Once they broke apart, Jin took a step back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Which wasn’t a good sign. What was a good sign was that he wasn’t killing him.

"Just because we dressed up as girls doesn't mean you get to kiss me like one," Jin said.

And it was the strangest concern to have, Ryuzo thought. Jin looked much better in armor than he ever could in any dress and Ryuzo would have assumed that he knew it well enough.

"I wanted to kiss you before that," he said. "It's not about you wearing a dress."

"Then what is it about? A bet?"

What kind of idea was that, Ryuzo thought, bewildered. He knew Jin didn't have it as easy as one might have assumed at the castle. That he provoked ugly feelings in a lot of people their age and since he never ratted anyone out to his uncle, he ended up suffering for it. But why would he assume anything like that about him?

"Are you serious?” he asked. “You are my best friend. I would never hurt you.”

"So it's your own…" Jin looked him in the eye, as if he expected to find some confirmation there, “idea?”

Ryuzo realized that he had never seen Jin's face so red before. And the sight sent even more blood where he didn’t need it.

"Yeah…" he confirmed tentatively.

It didn’t help the awkwardness that they were both naked. Jin crossed his arms across his chest but below his waist, he too was getting hard, even if just a little.

"Come on, Jin, let's…" 

"Let's what?" Jin still sounded defensive. "Is that why you wanted to go out of the castle with me?"

"No, it was spur of the moment," Ryuzo said quickly. "Look, whatever happens, we'll remain friends."

"People are more than friends when they kiss."

Ryuzo didn't argue. Though he didn't really see things that way, to put it mildly.

"I want to kiss you again," he said instead.

Jin seemed to be giving that idea a thought. He eyed Ryuzo's erection before looking back up to his face, which was somewhat embarrassing even if there was nothing to be embarrassed of there.

"Like what you see?" Ryuzo spoke up just to sound more courageous.

"I'm not sure." Jin shrugged. "All right. We'll kiss again. But promise me you are never going to use it against me."

"How would I use it?"

"It seems like a possibility. Just promise."

"Nobody will ever know, Jin. I won't use it against you either. Why would I do that? And what would I even do?"

"Also, I've never…"

"Oh, that's the best part," Ryuzo felt his blood boil at the thought.

And when they kissed again, Jin’s lips parted for him, and then their hands travelled all over each other's bodies. Then they lay down on the grass by the river and both came twice just from fumbling with each other's cocks.

Then they just lay on the grass some more before getting dressed and going to that hot spring. Jin seemed genuinely happy to be there, with him, like that, easing into the situation as if it was always meant to happen.

They came back to the castle before dinner the same way they had gone out. The next day, they figured out how to wash the girls’ clothes for them without anyone growing suspicious. Jin's uncle never knew that they had been gone.

And Ryuzo would have given everything just to go back to that day.

\---

"You don't get a free pass because of that," Jin said grimly. "You never mentioned it up till now. I thought you understood that."

He sounded much younger again somehow, not like the man he was, but like the boy who had gotten hurt.

But Ryuzo had never meant to hurt him back then. Actually, he would have done everything for him. At least for a time. 

After that first time in the woods he thought they'd just stop at jerking each other off when the opportunity arose. And for the rest of summer, it was like that, and it was probably the best time of his life.

It was Jin who didn't do things by halves. 

It was Jin who had invited Ryuzo to his room one night in the fall, since Ryuzo shared his with a dozen other recruits, and with some camellia oil that was used to oil katanas ready, he wanted to actually fuck. Ryuzo knew it was a bad idea right away but he couldn't really spell it out and in the heat of the moment he couldn't imagine just leaving when Jin had gone to these lengths for him and when he apparently wanted him so much. Jin worked through the pain and Jin liked it in the end. He felt better than anyone Ryuzo had ever had before him or after him, maybe just because he loved him so much more. He bit his own hand hard enough to draw blood to stop himself from making noise. And it was the best feeling in the world. But as it happened several more times, it was getting tinged with the thought of Ryuzo getting fucked in return. By this young lord, the heir of the jito. Like the commoner he was, born only to serve his masters, picked up from the street like a stray dog. Given a home, yes, but never really welcome there. Something changed when he started having these thoughts. And from there on, he realized how he hated Jin so badly that he wanted to strangle him in his sleep sometimes, through no fault of Jin's own, just for who he was. And for what he was going to eventually become.

Jin did ask him to switch places some time later for real. Ryuzo refused and he wouldn't budge on it, wouldn't give any explanation like having any actual problem with it, anything unsavory in his past to make it unbearable. And if he had just told Jin the right sob story, Jin would have let it go, Ryuzo was sure of that, and he could have had him, maybe even for a few more years, but he also didn't want to. Their intimate relationship ended over this altogether. Because maybe for Jin it was about them being equals, or at least trying to be when they could be, but for Ryuzo there was no being equals with the two of them being what they were. 

Then they grew more distant, though they still interacted plenty as friends. The sake helped, if they managed to lay their hands on any. They even kissed and did other things when drunk sometimes and Ryuzo suspected that Jin was actually waiting for him, giving him time to change his mind, as if it could ever be changed. Then he must have realized that it was futile because he got himself a girlfriend. A pretty little thing that was unsuitable for him to marry. That only lasted a short while before she was sent off in circumstances Ryuzo didn't know enough about with any certainty. After that, Jin never showed interest in any other women that Ryuzo knew of and there was never any talk of him actually getting married, but Ryuzo assumed that Jin's uncle was going to take care of that for him sooner or later.

Then came Lord Nagao's tournament and Jin went at him with all the resentment he must have been still holding about the whole thing. And Ryuzo's arm was never the same after that fight. It still hurt when the weather changed, but that was the least of his problems. 

Nobody knew what it meant to face Jin when he was like that at the time, to fight him for real and still stand one’s ground, at least for some time. Nobody realized Jin was a prodigy, or maybe just a force of nature. That one day he was going to defeat everyone: Kojiro, Lord Shimura, the Khan, a thousand Mongols, an army of ronin, whatever was thrown at him. 

What mattered that day was that Ryuzo had lost, badly. His one opportunity of turning his life around had been squandered, just like that. None of the commanders from the various samurai clans had shown interest in him and he wasn't going to ask Jin for anything, for obvious reasons. Lord Shimura had never liked him nor his influence on his nephew and if he had stayed at his castle as his retainer, he would have used the first opportunity that arose to give him a warrior's death. The Straw Hats were his only way out.

And maybe it had been for the better in the end. Because had he been a retainer at the Battle of Komoda, he would have been buried on that beach already. The Straw Hats had lost half their men there, too, but at least those of them who could run, ran. No honor code to stop them.

"The rift between us," Ryuzo spoke up, "has always been about you being the lord. Now people look up to you because of what you did for them, but in the eyes of the shogunate, you are worse than a commoner. So am I, if they ever find out I’m still alive. We're finally equals, Lord Sakai."

"We're not equals." Jin protested right away. "I never betrayed my people."

"That depends on the point of view.”

“Only if you can’t tell Mongols and Japanese apart.”

“My treason accomplished nothing. Other than the death of some blacksmith. Yours will tear this island apart. We’ll see about not betraying your people once it will get engulfed by the civil war between your supporters and the shogunate. Your uncle was stopping the newcomers from coming here and hunting you for real until you defeated all of the Mongols for them. But how long do you think you can last without fighting the samurai when they’ll come for you? And for your supporters? And if you’re not going to do anything for them, you might as well go away and let them figure it out for themselves."

"How did you find me?" Jin interrupted him, probably because he didn't like where this was going.

"I traced your steps from the last Mongol camp. I went there to salvage any supplies left after you had gone through there as the Ghost. There were a lot of body parts strewn around. And you did a bad job of killing the dogs. They ate some of their former masters. But you already know that. You were there, too, days after killing everyone. And you didn't even notice me there, you were that distracted. If it was someone else but me, they could have taken you down easily. And what were you even doing there?"

"The same thing as you."

"Not by any means, Lord Sakai, because you no longer need Mongol scraps. You have temples, you have Yarikawa, you have whole farms that support you. And I know that long before that camp fell, you went there for the first time, in disguise, or maybe out of it, considering Mongols don’t usually get to see you without a mask. The leftovers of the Mongol army do business with the unsavory elements of society now and you used that to get in there. They probably didn't know Japanese well enough to pick up on the way you talk. Like no criminal I've ever heard. What did you tell them to make them let you stay at their camp for a month? Who did you pretend you were? What were you even doing there? Collecting supplies? Eating their food so they'd starve faster?"

"I was learning."

"Learning what?"

"Mongolian. And everything else they know."

"You killed their Khan and then you went to their camp and ate their food for a month before murdering all of them."

"And you sound as if it personally offends you, Ryuzo. You like them so much? After what they have done to us? Burned our villages? Burned our people? Killed all the samurai? I only did what was necessary. We have to learn from them. While we've been stuck on this island, they have been everywhere. And if they ever come back, or if someone else comes for us from outside, we should know everything there was to learn."

" _So how is your Mongolian?_ " Ryuzo asked in Mongolian itself. It was coming easy to him at this point, after months of use.

" _Yours is better._ But I haven't learned by joining their side."

"Mongolian aside, there is something else you're not mentioning, Lord Sakai. There was a young man at that camp, taken by the Mongols from Goryeo, a bit difficult to communicate with, his Mongolian bad, his Japanese nonexistent. He might have been a bit too young to go to war overseas, although I'm not sure. When you slaughtered that camp at the end of your stay, you left him alive. And you even came back for him that night, right? To finish him off, or maybe not at all. But he wasn't there anymore. Because where do you think he could have gone? He came to us. And he talked."

Jin's brow furrowed. 

"You don't want to hear what he told us?" Ryuzo asked.

"Sure, tell me what incredible things you have learnt from him."

"Getting defensive?"

"I hope you realize that doesn't make me the kind of traitor you are."

"You slept with him."

"So? With the way you always acted, you must have slept with them as well.”

"And then you slaughtered his whole camp around him, cutting them to pieces, as if that was even necessary at that point. And then you left him all alone in a country that will never accept him."

"And like you said, he went right to you. Which helped you find me. And you could have killed me with that arrow. I risked my life for him just to let him go."

"And you even came back for him. But I don't think he's interested anymore."

"And all of it has nothing to do with you.”

"Do you know how many girls on this island would gladly welcome you into their beds? Just for the story to tell? They wouldn't even care if they then had to have your children. They would be proud. Why sleep with the enemy, at this point, when there are barely any left? Why not a Japanese?"

"It's nothing for you to pry into either way."

"Because it'd hit too close to home to find a man from Tsushima?"

"Too close to what? You? I killed you. I do not care for you. Not since you betrayed me."

"I did a lot of snooping around, actually, once I caught your trail. I think you're not at your best, Lord Sakai. That hat on my head, it actually comes from your hideout in Omi. Why keep it there, right, if you don't care?"

Jin looked at him as if he planned on taking that hat away from him. But then he calmed down and turned away toward the beach again.

"It's just a keepsake," he said. "Like a lot of other things there."

"Yes, a lot of interesting things. Poisonous plants, explosives, blades, finest blue dye. A complete armor of a Mongol general. What are you collecting all that for, I wonder? This hat is mine, though. I never gave it to you. And I'm taking it back."

"And I'll put it on your grave."

"How generous of you, Lord Sakai."

"Why aren't you calling me Jin?" Jin turned toward him, gradually losing his composure.

It used to be a joke between them for Ryuzo to call him 'Lord Sakai'. Because it had never made any sense to them back when they had been much younger that Ryuzo was just Ryuzo and Jin was all those other things, too. At the time, it had just been making them laugh.

"Because you don't care about me, remember?" Ryuzo said. "And why would I be so direct in addressing you in that case?"

"You're doing it precisely because I’m no longer a lord. But you're right. It doesn't matter.” Jin got up to his feet and dropped Ryuzo’s sword in front of him.

"Where are you going?"

"Leaving. The next time I see you, I'll kill you on sight, whatever you are. As retaliation for you hitting me in the back twice now. You squandered your opportunity to fight me in a duel ever again." He took a step back and bowed, which must have been a farewell. "If you are even real."

"Do you often see people who are not real, Lord Sakai?"

"Sometimes." Jin straightened up.

"That's concerning."

"Shove your concern for me up your ass, Ryuzo. You didn't care when the Khan had me tied up to that pole. Or when he beheaded my friend right in front of me." 

"Where are your manners, Lord Sakai? You're already talking like a ronin. Though I'm not sure if you're one now or if you're something even _worse_. You know what I was thinking about when you were tied up to that pole? That I'd like to go out there and fuck you against it. But there were too many people watching. The Khan might not have approved."

Jin's hand trembled when he reached for the kunai hidden in his clothes. 

"I mean, we might have tried that down the line, if you haven't fled," Ryuzo continued.

Jin was clearly distracted, he thought, which had been precisely his intention. He grabbed his calf and pulled his legs from under him. 

And when Jin fell, he covered his body with his own right away, took the kunai out of his hand and threw it aside and laced their fingers together just so Jin couldn't reach for anything else.

"I fucked that Goryeo man, too," he said right into Jin's face. "Just to see what he was like. And he doesn't hold a candle to you. I bet you didn't have that much fun with him either."

"More than you imagine," Jin said right away.

"Suit yourself." Ryuzo let go of Jin's hands. "I'll show you what you did to me."

He parted his kimono, baring the scar that was running down his entire chest. It had amazed everyone who had seen it so far, and Ryuzo was proud of it in his own way, but Jin didn't seem interested, at least not at first.

But then he did look at it, his eyes widening at the sight, and maybe he was finally starting to understand that it was real. Because the way he’d been acting around him earlier had made it all feel like a dream.

Ryuzo took Jin’s hand and put it on the mounds of scar tissue and when he let go of it, it stayed there and Jin’s thumb started rubbing circles over the scar. The skin on his fingers was rough, all sword calluses and scars of his own, but it still felt so good that Ryuzo pressed himself into the touch and leaned closer to Jin's face, as close as his hat would allow.

"Those dogs in that Mongol camp," Jin spoke up, "apparently weren't the only ones that I did a bad job of killing.”

“Shut up, Jin.” 

Jin's breathing grew ragged, maybe just at the use of his actual name, and for a moment it seemed as if he might start crying.

And Ryuzo wanted to comfort him so badly that it surprised him, because this was still the man who had killed all his men, had nearly killed him, had gone at him like a mortal enemy at a random tournament and had ruined his life. And at the end of it all believed himself to have always been in the right.

"I hate you so much,” Jin whispered before closing his eyes.

And it was all the invitation Ryuzo needed. 

He took off his hat and put it aside before leaning down further to kiss Jin’s lips, his closed eyelids, the stubble on his chin, the side of his neck, with his pulse quickening under his tongue. He could do this all day, he thought.

Jin’s hand travelled down his chest to his stomach along the scar, but it stopped there, short of reaching anything interesting, before falling to the side, and Ryuzo dared not close his own eyes for fear that Jin would reach for some blade he had on him and stab him with it.

But Jin just lay there. And Ryuzo pressed himself even closer, as close as the sheathed swords between them would allow, thinking how it was not likely that things were going to go much farther than that, no matter how much he might have wanted them to.

And as if on cue, Jin's hand gripped his shoulder. 

And the touch there reminded Ryuzo so vividly of that moment when Jin had held him to steady him before plunging his tanto into him, that he felt bile rise up in his throat and he had to break the kiss to swallow it down. 

Jin's touch burned the same way it had been burning back then, enough to rival the pain from Ryuzo's wounds. And in his final moments, Ryuzo had been so wistful. For something that could have been, if only they, _he_ , hadn't made all these mistakes. But then the blade sank deeper into him and everything started disappearing, falling out of focus forever. Until it had been too late.

Until it wasn’t.

He kissed Jin's lips again, wanting nothing more than for him to let him in, embrace him, get into it. Help him forget.

But Jin kept pushing him away instead until he put enough distance between them to slip out from under him and sit up.

“That’s enough,” he said.

And when Ryuzo straightened up and looked at his face, he appeared to be vaguely disgusted, most likely with himself. 

And maybe not as much of what they'd once shared was as easily salvageable as Ryuzo might have hoped.

Ryuzo pulled his kimono closed. They were somehow sitting much closer together now and he could feel the heat of Jin's body radiating to him through the layers of clothes between them. And all that warmth was pooling in the pit of his stomach. And he would have given a lot for Jin to submit to him like back in the old days.

"I missed you, Jin," he said.

Jin picked up the straw hat from the ground at their feet and looked at it closely from all sides, as if checking if it was really the one from his hideout. 

"When that man showed up on our ship,” Ryuzo continued, “and he was so terrified that he swam there without a boat, and told us of his encounter with you, I realized how much I didn’t want you going out into the world and getting someone else's hands on you ever again. How much you still mattered to me."

"So, you risked your life following me around just because you were jealous. _Years_ after we've been together. And after everything else that has happened. You realize how that makes you sound?"

"You always put the worst spin on everything I do when you're talking about it. Do it to yourself for once, see what you come up with."

Jin scowled, maybe just at the thought, and tossed the straw hat back to the ground.

"When we fought at Castle Kaneda," he said, "you yourself told me that we had been friends a lifetime ago. It didn't matter to you."

"Because I had tried to get away from you. And you were supposed to be dead after Komoda. But then, there you were again, walking into my camp as if you owned it, ordering my men around. Wanting to save your uncle who could rot in hell for all I cared. And wondering why I hadn't chosen to be your servant instead. Or his. While you used to know how much I hated that damned castle."

"You wouldn't have been my servant. In anything but name. You would have been my brother in arms."

"Regardless of how you felt, that is what people would have seen. And I wanted to prove myself, not just get things handed to me because we were friends. And it was long before I realized that there was no point in me trying to get away from you. Because it never works."

Jin got up to his feet, taking his warmth with him, but then he crouched down again to pick up his kunai from the ground.

"You're complaining?" he said without looking at him. "I spent years not touching anyone. At first, because I didn't want to. Then because I knew I was going to get married, if for no other reason then for my clan, and I felt like I should have been fair to my future wife. Not jaded by sleeping with half the castle by the time she got to me. Then the war started and all that fell by the wayside. And that man was my first in all this time. And all it did was bring you back to me."

"Because you're mine."

"No, I'm not. And I don't see where you got that idea."

"Because you want to be."

"We broke up because of you."

"We broke up because there was no way for us to be together anyway, not in your uncle's castle, waiting for you to marry. You don't realize that, Jin? You can do whatever you want with your life now. You are free. And you are the Ghost. You make the rules. You want to be with a man, everyone better accepts it. And if you're so very much not mine, then why were you calling that guy my name when you were with him? That was the reason why it couldn't be anyone from around here, right? Because if they happened to know, they would have balked at the idea."

Jin paled.

"Why would he tell you that?" he asked. "Was he a spy?"

“No, I don't think so. He was just someone who needed to talk after what you’ve done to him. And all I did was offer him a shoulder to cry on."

"How much Mongolian do you speak?"

"A lot, actually. And Jin?"

"What?"

"I'll take care of you, if you let me. Because you are falling apart. And it wouldn't be good for Tsushima if you lost your mind, like our late friend Kojiro."

"And you think that you, of all people, can make it better?"

"I think if I can't, then nobody else can." 

Jin pocketed the kunai and straightened up and Ryuzo felt that they were done as well. He picked up his hat and his bow from the ground and got to his feet.

"It's time for me to move," he said, "if I want to reach that temple of yours in the north in two days time. We'll see each other there, Jin."

"The people there will kill you."

"So you just have to show up before me and stop them."

"I'll take you out myself to save them the trouble.”

"Then you'll have plenty of opportunities while I travel. Lots of time to think about it, too," Ryuzo said and started climbing down to where his horse was. 

He looked over his shoulder to see if Jin had moved at all, but he was still standing on top of the rocks, his silhouette stark against the blue sky behind him. 

"See you at that temple,” Ryuzo called out to him.

And Jin flinched before looking down at him, as if he hadn’t expected him to still _exist_ once he went away.

"I won't be there," he said.

"You will be. And we both know it.”

  



	2. Fort Kaminodake 1

It didn't take travelling all the way to Jogaku Temple for Jin to turn up.

After riding his horse north all day, Ryuzo set up camp in Kubara Forest, north of Omi Village, in the woods he and Jin used to play in as children. He was going to go to Fort Kaminodake in the morning, since it was still letting everyone pass through to the north freely. This was the Ghost’s decision, but the men holding that fort for him were under increasing pressure from the samurai to give it up, now that that many of them had arrived and the spring was near. It was a well-known fact that the fort was going to change hands soon and then probably be transformed into a checkpoint requiring money and the right papers to pass through like back in the old days. And all kinds of people were rushing to go where they needed to go before that. Including him.

It was a cloudless night and Ryuzo hoped he wouldn't need a roof over his head down the line and just put his goza mat on the ground and started a fire. He didn't have much food with him, even though he'd taken everything he'd found at that last Mongol camp for himself, so he'd split it into small portions that could last him a while in a pinch and had planned on hunting to supplement it. He was too weary to hunt on that night though and had no other choice but to eat a handful of scraps of stale dried meat, probably from a horse, all things considered, doing his best to forget the taste right away.

Following Jin around for the past few days had been grueling because Jin _did not sleep_ , except maybe for a bit in the saddle, and he moved around at night only to move around some more during the day, having apparently transcended such earthly concerns as the need of rest.

That might have been what had dulled his senses to the point that it was possible to follow him at all, Ryuzo thought. But when he was fighting, he was still the same as always, and he had almost put his tanto in Ryuzo again, despite having been hit with an arrow before that. It was only a matter of luck that Ryuzo hadn't gotten himself killed _again_ , by the same man, at that, and the choice to go meet Jin at all appeared to be much braver in hindsight than he might have liked.

He sat down by the fire with his hand on the hilt of his sword and thought how his arm hurt, as if the weather was still going to change. He started dozing off after a while, with the only sound he could hear, other than the background hum of the forest around him, that of his horse grazing somewhere nearby. But then, jostled awake by something he couldn’t recall, he noticed a flash of white far away among the trees.

It was moving slowly. A big animal, he realized. It might have just been a run away ox. And on any other night, he would have left it at that and gone back to sleep.

But it might have also been a white horse.

"Jin?" he called out into the night, getting to his feet, though he didn’t really expect an answer.

And he didn’t get any. Nothing changed in his surroundings either, even as he surveyed them closely, wondering if Jin hadn’t made the decision to kill him without showing his face at all. He would have certainly been able to come up with enough _reasons_ to convince himself to do that.

The sky was starry and it was fairly bright, but Ryuzo couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. But if Jin wanted to hide, then he could have still hid, and there was nothing he could have done if Jin wanted him dead, he was aware of as much. And there was no point dwelling on it.

He collected his belongings and started walking toward that white animal. As he got closer, it became obvious that it was a samurai horse, with a fur-lined mino draped over its side. Someone was going north.

The horse didn’t let him come very close and ran away. And once the noises it had been making quietened in the distance, some other sounds could be heard from deeper in the forest, distant voices, screams. Until, as Ryuzo approached, it started sounding like quite a rowdy camp, probably full of bandits.

This close to Omi Village, he thought. That wouldn’t have been happening before the war, on clan Sakai’s watch.

A loud noise from that place might have been what had initially woken him up earlier. And if Jin had been following him, which his horse’s presence seemed to indicate, this could also explain where he had gone.

There was no point in Ryuzo himself getting any closer to that camp, though, and he was ready to retreat to find his own horse, light a new fire somewhere and catch up on sleep, when someone lunged at him, while he had just been standing there.

With the kind of noise that person made simply taking a few steps, it surely wasn’t Jin.

Ryuzo sidestepped the attack. It was a bandit swinging something that looked like a makeshift poleaxe but there were plenty of openings there. Ryuzo drew his sword and ran him through from the front, but while at it, nearly got impaled by another blade piercing that man from the back at the same time.

“What are you doing?” he asked, pulling his sword out of the stilling body.

“I thought I was alone.” Jin was actually close to him, within arm’s reach if not for the dead body lodged between them, but that only lasted a second. Then he pulled out his own sword and took several steps back before wiping it down.

And if not for the glint of the blade, he would have become completely invisible in the deep shadow of the trees, in an all black armor and with a black mask on his face.

They heard footsteps approaching and hid themselves. A group of about ten bandits ran right in front of them, making so much noise all at the same time that it was impossible to discern what they were saying other than ‘the Ghost’. They hadn’t even noticed the body on the ground and left.

“Why are they running around like headless chicken?” Ryuzo asked once they were gone, though he could imagine some answers to that question himself.

“Because they’re poorly trained. And they have found some bodies."

Ryuzo thought back to the last Mongol camp and the condition the bodies there had been in when he'd gone there and he wondered if these bandits, by virtue of being Japanese, looked any better after their deaths at the Ghost’s hand.

“Whatever you’re doing, Jin,” he spoke up, “I’m getting out of here. I'll find you later."

"Wait." Jin actually grabbed his hand before he could go.

And his own hand was wet, with blood, Ryuzo realized when he looked down. Blood that was not someone else’s, as he would have expected, but Jin’s own, flowing from a cut going down his forearm under the cut through armor on his left arm. ‘Poorly trained?’, Ryuzo thought. ‘Not all of them, apparently.’

Considering Jin was injured, the way he’d dispatched that man earlier was quite impressive.

"These are not just any bandits," Jin said grimly, pulling his hand out of Ryuzo's grasp and cradling his arm to his chest. “And they have made it personal.”

And Ryuzo wondered what exactly he had stumbled upon.

Jin crouched down with his back against a tree and took off his mask to hold it in his uninjured hand.

“You have been following me,” Ryuzo said, staying where he was, a few steps away from Jin.

“Up to the point I happened to find _them_ , yes,” Jin confessed right away.

“To kill me?”

“To see what you were up to.”

"I’m going to Jogaku. Just like I told you. And you seem to be going north as well.”

“Eventually.”

“What’s going on here?”

“You remember how my father died?”

That was out of left field, Ryuzo thought. He remembered it having happened of course, but he hadn’t been there nor privy to too many details, especially not at first.

“The reason why we went north back then?” Jin continued. “Himeka?”

Ryuzo didn’t remember her by name. But there had been a girl their age who had been abducted from Omi Village by bandits and taken to the north. It had been the first time something like that had ever happened since anyone in Omi Village could remember. There had always been strong samurai living there and bandits generally steered clear of it and if they risked stealing anything, it was things, animals, but not girls. Jin’s father had been furious, from what Ryuzo had heard over time, and he had rushed to the north with just a few of his men and Jin, who wouldn’t have been any help at the time anyway. And that might have been his mistake. Though there had also always been rumors about the men who had killed him not being true bandits at all. But Lord Shimura had gotten rid of them the very next day and whatever they had been or known about, they had taken it with them to their graves.

“I didn’t remember her name,” Ryuzo admitted. It was Jin's thing to remember names of random people and inquire about their even more random children and friends months down the line.

“I talked to her once," Jin said. "When my uncle freed her and brought her back home from the north, she came over with her parents after my father’s funeral to pay her respects. And to tell me what a great warrior my father was.”

“You never told me that.”

Why the heartfelt conversation, Ryuzo wondered.

“Because it hurt to even think about?" Jin said. "You know how I _was_. He might have been a great warrior, but I...”

Jin had not been supposed to be one yet at all back then, was the simple answer. But that had never stopped him from getting racked with guilt over what had happened.

And there had been a time when Ryuzo could have told when Jin had been dreaming about his father’s death just by the unintelligible sounds he had been making in his sleep. And when Jin would have tried to pressure him into hurting him, because he had been thinking he didn’t deserve any better.

Hopefully, saving the whole damn island had done something for his self-esteem since then.

“She's been abducted again,” Jin said.

“What do you mean, again?”

“Now. They’ve had her in that camp. I’ve _seen_ her there.”

Surely, that must have been just some kind of a strange coincidence, Ryuzo thought.

“Bandits?” he asked.

“No.” Jin shook his head. "Bandits were just the decoy. They expected me to go north around this time, just like you did. And they have been making a lot of noise so I’d come here and find them."

“Then who?”

“I don’t really _care_ who they are. I already killed one the last time they tried something. But they do it on purpose. Like the Khan promising to bring people who were close to me so I could see their deaths...”

Ryuzo wondered if Jin was going to mention his involvement in that situation, but he didn't.

“They’re _playing with their food_ ,” Jin continued, “instead of just…”

“What happened to the one who cut your arm?”

“He fled.”

Apparently, the hunt for the Ghost was done in a less straightforward manner than Ryuzo might have expected. But maybe, just like the Mongols for a time, they were not actually trying to simply kill the Ghost, but wanted something else from him.

“We both know where they will take her now,” Jin said.

And Ryuzo was wary of the 'we’. For now, it was none of _his_ business.

“I wouldn’t go there if I were you,” was all he said.

But of course, not going was not an option that Jin was going to consider even for a second anyway. They both knew as much as well.

“They’ll go to the north through Castle Shimura,” Jin said. “Not somewhere where we can follow...”

The ‘we’ was becoming a more solid thing, Ryuzo thought, even though he hadn't agreed to take part in anything yet.

“I need your help,” Jin said then, as if on cue.

And with an arm like that, he probably did. With needing to go to _that_ place, too.

Ryuzo had been there with him once already. They had been doing something for the Shimura estate in the north and Jin had decided to go to the place where his father had died while they had been passing by.

It had been... strange.

It happened at a time when Ryuzo was already conflicted about the whole thing with Jin but it was also a trip to the north and away from Castle Shimura, which always improved his mood. Everything around them was white and pristine, Jin was wearing a fur coat, but not the kind commoners wore, but one that was almost silver and shined in the sunlight, making him stick out wherever he went, which was probably the point. He was reminiscing about his parents more than usual. And he was very beautiful. And very broken. His father had died under a red maple tree, the same kind as the ones growing at the Sakai family cemetery, because of course he had, and Jin standing there _suffering_ with the white and the red and the silver might have been one of the most breathtaking things Ryuzo had ever seen in his life. And despite being out in the open, Jin let him kiss him to try and cheer him up when he approached him.

“You need my help?" Ryuzo repeated. "Just like that?"

“You came to me yesterday. You followed me now. Because you wanted something from me. This is what I can give you.”

“Except I don’t see where’s the ‘giving’ part.”

“In trusting you wouldn’t make things worse?”

Because that woman’s life was so important to him, Ryuzo thought, Jin was really going to overlook everything for a time just to have a shot at saving her, it seemed.

“What do I get in return?” he asked.

“You’ll act like a decent man and I’ll see you differently.”

Jin, who used to promise him making him a samurai as only one of the things he could have arranged for him, was now reduced to promising him… something.

“My father would have liked us to do this together," he said.

“Of course he would. All that investment in me has always been about me serving your family the best I could one day.”

“Back when he was still alive, you were part of that family.”

"I do not have brotherly feelings for you, Jin."

Something started happening in the bandit camp then. Burning there. They headed to a cliff overlooking it to get a better look. A group of mounted archers was attacking it with flaming arrows, with sashimono banners high up in the air.

“It's served its purpose," Jin said. "They’re now allowed to get rid of it."

"Well, at least they’re cleaning up after themselves. Who are these guys?"

"They are living in my former estate with their families. The new Omi samurai.”

“People will like them plenty after they get rid of that camp, won't they? I’m an Omi villager myself and I’m already impressed. There’s also more of them, not just the lonely you.”

"Do we have a deal?"

"Sitting at Castle Shimura all the time anyway," Ryuzo continued.

“Let’s go,” Jin interrupted him. 

\---

It took them some time to find their horses in the forest once they’d retreated, but conveniently, both were grazing in the same place, right next to each other.

“See, they’re already friends,” Ryuzo said.

Jin put his uninjured hand on the neck of his horse.

“You know how I’ve found you?” Ryuzo spoke up by his side. “I saw your horse in the forest and followed it. You want to hide in the woods, you should get a black one.”

“I used to have a black one,” Jin said but didn’t elaborate beyond that. 

“Where are we going?”

“To Fort Kaminodake." Jin got on his horse.

His arm needed to be dressed properly, which was going to be easier to do there as well.

He set off and Ryuzo followed him. And it had been surprisingly easy to make him do that, Jin thought, maybe _too easy_ in fact, but it had to do for now. He had no time to look for other allies. And Takeshi from the fort didn’t seem trustworthy to him either. He was much too bitter over Yuna.

“I’m surprised you didn’t remember that girl’s name,” Jin spoke up a moment later, unable to stop himself. “I always thought you liked her. Back then.”

“I liked her. Because she was swimming naked in the lake in the mornings. And you went there to hide and watch her _with me_.”

Actually, Jin had been going there to watch Ryuzo watch her, but he was not going to tell him that after all those years. But he could still remember his teenage self thinking ‘he’ll never look that way at me’ and being utterly devastated.

“She was really eye-catching,” Ryuzo said. “And it doesn’t seem to work in her favor.”

As they were getting closer to the fort, they were passing by people sleeping on the side of the road with everything they owned or travelling slowly in the direction of it in the night. Some of them recognized Jin as the Ghost. Some as Lord Sakai. And some mistook them for the new arrivals.

“Jin,” Ryuzo called his name, “back in the old days, how did these bandits leave Toyotama in the first place anyway?”

Why was he interested in that all of a sudden, Jin wondered. He couldn’t recall how and probably had been too young at the time to retain that information even if someone had told him.

“We went after them through Castle Shimura,” he said, which was as much as he could remember. “But the guards at the castle wouldn’t have let bandits through. I don’t know about Kikuchis. It was years ago. And after Komoda, my uncle is probably the only person left alive who knows.”

“Conveniently. By the way, which side is he exactly on right now? The same one that brought those bandits there and abducted that woman?”

“You think he gets to make any decisions?" Jin asked.

Lord Shimura had not made any public appearances since their duel, even though it had been _months_ , with no proven information about his health, just rumors of his death, or at best, imprisonment for failing to apprehend him. But it had also been months with no new jito. And Clan Shimura’s legacy was probably kept up for grabs for now to keep the newcomers on their toes, if Jin were to make a guess.

“If he's imprisoned, he can't be blamed for anything," he said.

“You're still defending him, Jin? After what he's done to you?”

“He’s still my family.” Jin didn't feel like discussing it beyond that.

He went faster, despite the pain in his arm. Dark clouds were gathering over the sea on the horizon. Hopefully, the storm wasn’t going to catch up to them before they arrived.

“You’re still reading Sun Tzu?” Ryuzo called out after him, apparently attempting to keep a conversation going just for conversation's sake.

“I read some in that Mongol camp. Can you still fight the same as before?” 

“You doubt that?”

Jin should have expected Ryuzo to answer like that, regardless of how things actually were.

“I don’t understand how you could have survived," he said, "much less how your body is now."

“The one part you should be most interested in wasn’t affected at all,” Ryuzo said, as if that was at all appropriate. “But other than that, did you consider the possibility that you really didn’t do a good enough job killing me? That maybe you _couldn’t_?”

Jin didn’t like that thought at all. Not when he’d been specifically trying to give someone a quick and painless death. And he wondered how much Ryuzo must have suffered for his mistake before he’d healed.

“Then why didn't you tell me that yesterday?” he asked. “Instead of some story, of which who knows how much is even true?”

“Who knows how much of these stories about the Thief are true either, right? Was she really a pirate in China once? Are you even real? Or did she conjure you up from the bloodied sands at Komoda Beach, a vengeful spirit of eighty dead samurai?"

"Except I don't spread these stories myself."

"Except with your blade.”

Lightning struck across the night sky, followed by thunder. They were close to the sea and the Sago lighthouse was visible in the distance, which should have made it possible to keep moving at least in the general direction of the fort even during a storm. Jin wasn’t looking up to it, though. His arm hurt bad enough without getting wet.

“I heard that story about you being followed by storms wherever you go, too,” Ryuzo said. “Good for you, I guess. A storm sank the Mongol fleet.”

It started raining a moment later and with the sky covered with dark clouds, Jin could barely tell where they were going. He was soaked to the bone by the time they reached the fort’s gate and water mixed with blood was dripping onto the ground from his arm.

“You said I’d get killed if I go to Jogaku,” Ryuzo spoke up once they stopped their horses. “So what about the people who hold this fort?”

“You didn’t kill _their_ brother. Unless you did. They shouldn’t care. Just leave the straw hat with the horse. And they’re leaving for the mountains in two days anyway. I don’t care what they’ll think.”

The gate was opened for them and, upon seeing his condition, the men there made them sit by the fire and helped arrange the supplies needed for sewing the wound shut right away.

Ryuzo did it, because it didn’t seem like anyone better at it was around anyway. And Takeshi only appeared once Jin was done moaning in pain and the wound was dressed, most likely having waited as a courtesy to him.

“You’re hurt, Lord Sakai,” he said, bowing respectfully even while Jin was sitting. “Were it…”

“Bandits.”

“On the other side of the fort, we have a whole camp of samurai now,” Takeshi said. “It’s good it wasn’t them.”

'Yes', Jin thought.

"What are they doing there?” he asked.

“Flying sashimono banners. Waiting. Though they set up a checkpoint on the road out of the fort yesterday afternoon and started collecting toll. The fort backed up with people because of that. We should probably not open the gates today… or it’ll happen again."

“You'd leave people stranded if you do this without any advance notice.”

“If we open the gates, it will be hell on earth here, but whatever you want, Lord Sakai. One more day is all I can give you anyway. We caught some spies. And I don’t know what they are paying them with, but I had executed men for spying in front of a handful of other men, and out of those, some were then caught spying as well. The position here is untenable. We are leaving tonight. Or all of us will be gone anyway.”

"Go safely when you do."

Back in the fall, when Jin had asked Takeshi and his men to hold that fort for him throughout the winter, he had still been counting on possibly reconciling with his uncle sometime soon. They would have been rewarded then. On his own, he had nothing to give them, other than these words.

“When Yuna passed through here a few weeks ago,” Takeshi spoke up, “she said you’d arrive sooner or later, so I kept the last three spies we caught for you. Though one jumped down and fell to his death already.”

“I’ll go to them.”

“We have something to discuss first, Lord Sakai,” Ryuzo spoke up.

“Who is your companion?” Takeshi inquired only then, but it didn't seem like he was suspicious. Or even interested.

“An old friend.” Jin left it at that. “So, you did get to see Yuna again?" 

“Yes, I’ve seen her." 

Jin wondered if she had been alone.

"I’ll go now," Takeshi excused himself. "You will be taken to the spies when you want to, just ask someone.”

“What do you want, Ryuzo?” Jin asked once Takeshi had left.

“That guy has either lost his mind," Ryuzo said, "or he legitimately offed half his men for spying and still thinks it’s not getting any better. How long do you intend to stay here?”

“Not long. I have to go get something I have left here. And some food. And change the dressing on that wound on my back.”

“I’ll do it.”

“And then you’ll complain.”

“You’ll owe me.”

“Forget it. You seem extremely hopeful, but it isn’t happening.”

“It’s just _morning_ , Jin. And talk like that some more and when you'll want it, I won’t do it, until you'll come begging.”

Ryuzo was already getting ahead of himself, Jin thought. And there were limits to what he would have done. He was still a traitor, still a Mongol dog, still…

He let him dress that wound. It was difficult to reach on his own.

“Why did you threaten that guy over the Thief?” Ryuzo asked while taking care of it.

“What do you mean?”

“When you asked him if he’d seen her again, you looked ready to strangle him with your bare hands.”

He had not done that on purpose.

After his wound was dressed, they went to take some of the food that the villagers passing through the fort had left for the Ghost. There was way more of it than Jin could ever use and he hoped that there was still enough time left to give it to people who needed it more than him. Ryuzo was very impressed. But with the kind of stories that were coming out of the Mongol ships, about soldiers being kept under the decks, _eating each other_ , food in abundance could be something he hadn’t seen lately. Who knows, maybe even ever since he’d left the Shimura estate.

They ate and then Jin went to retrieve the Sakai armor, which he had left in the fort before while passing through it. He put it on, which was a ton of work, and went to execute the spies.

“With nobody watching?” Ryuzo asked him once everything was ready, with them kneeling down on a porch overlooking the sea with their hands bound in front of them.

Once Jin drew his sword, one of them wet himself. But at least they stayed quiet.

Some snow had fallen on the ground in the fort after sunrise, with Kamiagata already living up to its reputation, and a chilly wind was blowing from the north.

“ _You’re watching,_ ” Jin said before beheading both of the men, their blood marking the snow.

It hurt a lot but his arm could be used, he thought, if the need arose. He wiped down his sword and sheathed it. Ryuzo was shivering, probably from the cold, because the clothes he was wearing weren’t really up to par.

“They won’t be using these furs anymore after they're dead, you know,” he said, motioning to the dead men’s clothes before leaving Ryuzo to it and going away to call some men to help him take the headless bodies to the tower over the entrance to the fort on Kamiagata side.

Once up there, he looked down at the samurai camp on the other side of the walls. It was full of sashimono banners, some of them purple ones of clan Oga, but most having different designs that he could only vaguely recognize from seeing them in passing in the past few weeks. They appeared to be ready to move on the fort as soon as it was empty.

Or sooner.

The road into the fort, blocked by a checkpoint, was already packed with people waiting for the gate to open.

Ryuzo climbed onto the tower, too, and joined his side, which was something he hadn’t expected.

Then the men arrived with the headless bodies wrapped in straw mats, started hauling them up to where they were on the tower and once they were done, left as quickly as possible. Probably because it wasn’t the prettiest sight, to put it mildly.

"What will you be doing with these?" Ryuzo asked him.

"We still have to leave this fort somehow. And they," Jin motioned down toward the samurai camp, "must already know I'm here."

"And? What will you do to them? Poison their _sake_?"

The brutal honesty might have been refreshing but it also hit him where it hurt, Jin thought. 

“No, of course not,” he said. “You’ll simply go through the gate. And then you’ll wait for me. Let's go down now."

They did.

“So, you found it in yourself to wear the Sakai armor,” Ryuzo spoke up once they were at the base of the tower.

It had been months since Jin had put it on for the first time, but Ryuzo might not have seen him in it yet, all things considered.

And Jin wondered what he thought. Did he look like his father, like Yuriko had told him? Did he look as awesome as Kazumasa had looked to them when they had been children?

Because they had been enamored with that armor. Every time they had been allowed a sleepover together at the Sakai estate, if the armor was there, they would end up lying on the floor of the main hall, looking at it, and telling each other ghost and demon stories.

It would have been silly to ask Ryuzo about things like that, though.

When they were older, Ryuzo developed a strange fascination with that armor and would sometimes come over and sit in the main hall, staring at it for what felt like hours to Jin, refusing to speak to him and play with him during that time. Jin never learned what that was about but it seemed to have ended around the time his father died.

Then, during the time when they were serving at Castle Shimura, when he and Ryuzo were allowed a trip back to Omi Village so Jin could visit Yuriko and Ryuzo could see his mother, having arrived home, Jin was trying to meditate in front of it, looking for some kind of guidance from his father, and Ryuzo came over but instead of acting like a normal person, he sat behind him, bothered him with his touches, pushed him down to the floor and removed his yukata from him. And while the Sakai estate was a half-abandoned place by then and Yuriko lived there with just a couple of servants, it was still a bit much to be doing that in the middle of the house, in the main room with doors on all sides. It kind of happened too quickly for Jin to stop it, though, or that was how he was justifying it to himself. During that little excursion they were fucking twice a day and he didn’t really need any preparation, so Ryuzo smeared some oil on himself and just took him in front of that armor.

He should have killed him back then, Jin thought.

The way Ryuzo was looking at him now was making it feel somewhat suffocating to be wearing all that steel.

And Jin could see himself and Ryuzo with his mind’s eye, removing that armor from him piece by piece and then lying together, naked body to naked body.

“Like what you see?” he asked, doing his best to sound indifferent, but not succeeding at all.

“Very much, Lord Sakai,” at least Ryuzo sounded bothered, too.

This was a fort full of spies, maybe about to be stormed by samurai. Jin wasn’t convinced if Ryuzo himself wasn’t working for someone. He might have said that he’d come from a Mongol ship, one of those hellish places Mongols talked about among themselves, but he appeared to be well-fed enough and he had a nice horse, a samurai battle horse better than Jin’s own, and where had he gotten it on the Mongol side?

He had just stolen it, Jin thought, but he wasn’t convinced. And he was never going to be as easily convinced again.

“Come on,” he still forced out of his constricting throat and led the way into some empty barracks, the scales on his armor rustling with his every step.

The door didn’t lock, of course, but he didn’t really care.

And as soon as it was closed, Ryuzo embraced him from behind, his lips on his neck, his hand pushing itself under the armor between his legs until it took hold of him. And Jin's hips buckled into that hold.

"Eager, are you? Missed me much?” Ryuzo whispered into his ear.

“Yes,” Jin actually said aloud.

So very much, after everything had been said and done, he thought.

"It doesn't even matter what I've done," Ryuzo continued speaking into his ear. "You may be so righteous about that, but deep down, you're still…"

How badly Jin had wished to have him by his side in his hideout or at down times during the war. How, even looking back to Komoda and the night before the battle, he would have rather drunk sake with him and the other ronin than spent time with the samurai readying themselves with meditation and writing death poems.

“My father… died in this armor,” Jin forced out through clenched teeth as Ryuzo continued stroking him.

“And? What do you expect me to do? You’ll freeze if I take it off you.”

Jin didn’t really know himself what he was expecting. He pushed himself into Ryuzo’s hand since that was easy enough to do, despite the chaos in his mind.

If he was going to come, just from this, as an adult man, Ryuzo was going to be mocking him for it to the end of his days, he thought, but it didn't really matter to him in the end. It just happened and Ryuzo closed his hand around the head the best he could so it wouldn’t spill.

And since it was him, he then forced that hand into Jin’s mouth, finger by finger, and made him lick it clean.

Jin still wanted more after that. But he also knew that it was over. That it had to be over. He kneeled down on the floor, fastening his armor closed with shaking hands, not caring about any further cleanup. He heard Ryuzo leave the building, but he must have been coming back, because he’d left behind his bow and quiver on the floor next to Jin. The arrows were poisoned, all but one, Jin realized when he looked at them. Apparently, Ryuzo had been learning new tricks as well.

Ryuzo came back but stayed close to the door and while it felt as if he wanted to say something, he didn't say anything in the end.

It was probably better that way, Jin thought, as he got to his feet and headed to the door, walking past Ryuzo, who still needed to go in there to take his bow and, once outside, went to the altar in the fort and kneeled on the snow in front of it.

Some incense was burning there already but he didn’t have any of his own.

Seven generations of Sakai, he thought, and this was what it all amounted to.

They were silent. Maybe because he had no incense or because he was not one of them anymore. Or maybe they just didn’t approve of what he was doing. Or of what he’d just done.

Ryuzo joined him but he looked a bit lost next to him. Hard to pray to one’s ancestors when you don’t know who they are, Jin supposed.

And he wondered what his father would have said if he could learn that all these years later, he and Ryuzo were not comrades, not friends, not brothers, like he might have wanted them to be, but _this_.

  



	3. Fort Kaminodake 2

Having too much time on their hands, since they were pretty much sitting around waiting for death, the Mongols were open to discussing random things. Though it used to be way more lively, even just a short time ago. Now they were down to three people willing to spend the night talking and drinking, with one of them being the Goryeo man, who had only arrived a few days prior and was still in much better shape than was the average on the ship, but that was also going to be just a matter of time, Ryuzo thought.

Jin might have given him a better death by not sparing him, all things considered, though Mongols seemed to believe that if their blood was spilled, they would just disappear into nothingness. Starving might have been giving them an afterlife, although Ryuzo wasn’t sure. But then again, that man wasn’t a Mongol at all.

Ryuzo had been feeding him out of his own food stores for the time being but there was only so much he could learn from him to make it worth his while. And in the end he didn't want _him_. He wanted Jin.

“So, why do you both have such a strange name?" he asked.

"Not for the same reason, I don't think so." Khenbish was still wearing the Mongol general's armor, even this late at night. And he was probably not going to stop wearing it until the very end.

The other Khenbish, the Goryeo man, was sitting by Ryuzo's side, closer to him than would have been appropriate under normal circumstances, but the circumstances were far from normal on these ships. The last camp had fallen, nobody was coming, there was no food, and there were soldiers starving under the very deck they were sitting on, probably dying from hunger right then, hopefully not eating each other, though that had also already happened. And for all his failures as the Straw Hats leader, Ryuzo had never seen anything like this ever before.

Khenbish didn’t feed his soldiers at all at this point. He barely fed himself and he probably only liked Ryuzo because, being Japanese, he fended for himself by finding food onshore and even brought back gifts sometimes. Like the sake they were drinking.

“The other soldiers must have called him that because they couldn’t pronounce whatever his actual name is,” Khenbish said with a shrug.

“But it means _‘nobody’_ , right?" Ryuzo asked.

Khenbish laughed.

“Of course,” he said. “Most foreigners in the Mongol army don’t have it as good as you, you know. They don’t get to talk to the Khan. Or even generals like me. See, even now, he’s not saying anything. And that’s why he’s called that.”

"What about you? Your actual parents named you ‘nobody’?”

Khenbish grew serious.

“That was to ward off evil spirits," he said. "Because they have already taken my brother before me. With no name, they can’t see you.”

“You think that might work against the Ghost?”

Khenbish grimaced at the mention of the Ghost, even though the Ghost had been the topic of most of the conversations among the Mongols for months now.

“You think he’s going to come here?” he asked, as if that had occurred to him for the very first time.

Having survived three run-ins with the Ghost, not to mention having known him in the past, though not everyone believed that the Ghost was human enough to have had any past at all, Ryuzo was often asked these questions about what the Ghost would do. And he had never had any useful answers beyond 'sooner or later, he'll come for every single one of you'.

“I don't know," he said this time around as well. "But there are no more camps on land for him to attack. What will he be doing now, right? It's just, if he’s coming here, he’d better hurry, or it might be a little empty by the time he gets here."

“I'm ready when he is," Khenbish said.

But even Khenbish, as immovable as he seemed in that golden armor, wasn’t going to be here _forever_.

“Have you heard what the other Khenbish here said, by the way?” Ryuzo asked. “Those orders from the generals in Toyotama that you got from that camp, Jin… _the Ghost_ had brought them himself when he showed up there, back when they hadn't known it had been him."

“Ah, it means they’re dead, too. Good riddance. What would I do with their orders anyway?”

“I’ll go to that camp," Ryuzo offered. "See if there’s anything left there.”

The other Khenbish flinched against him at the mere mention of that place. It must have been pretty bad there, but that didn’t mean that there was nothing to find. Jin had probably not been interested in their food at that point and had just left it all behind.

“Go," Khenbish agreed. "I could use whatever you can bring. Except, will you even come back this time around?” he asked, which was a first. Before then, it had always been more along the lines of 'you'd better be back'.

Not like Khenbish could have _made_ him come back, of course, Ryuzo thought. For a long time now, it had been more about him not having anywhere else to go.

“I've seen your new horse at the shore,” Khenbish said, sounding somewhat wistful, most likely because his own horses had long since been eaten.

“It is a bit far to see much from here."

“It’s beautiful. How did you get it? Someone has given it to you? Have you found a new master, samurai?”

"I'm a ronin."

"You're all the same to me." Khenbish shrugged.

"I just have places to go now."

"Which means you’re not coming back."

“If I won't come back, take good care of your new recruit for me. Don’t feed him to your men, in any sense of the word.”

Khenbish smiled.

“The only thing I can promise you is that I will slit his throat first,” he said. “And when you do go, don’t forget that you owe your life to our Empire. Which is eternal. Because we will be back to collect our debts.”

\---

“Jin, wake up.” Ryuzo jabbed Jin in the ribs with his elbow, which must have been more painful for him than for Jin, what with the armor covering Jin’s torso, but it still jolted him awake.

And he had a hard time telling where he was and what was happening at first, but things fell into place quickly enough. The altar at Fort Kaminodake. He had been praying. And now he had to leave. Ryuzo's presence by his side puzzled him for a second too long since he was supposed to be _dead_. Except not anymore.

The fact that he’d randomly fallen asleep didn't seem unusual to Jin anymore. Since he’d stopped sleeping for longer stretches of time at night, he was always on the verge of falling asleep for a moment if the location felt safe enough and he didn't need to be doing anything. He supposed it was a brave choice to be falling asleep like that in front of Ryuzo, though. One his body had made entirely on its own. Which might have had something to do with the fact that he'd let Ryuzo jerk him off.

He shivered, thinking how he could still taste himself on his tongue after Ryuzo had made him lick it off his hand. He wasn't sure if he liked that anymore, except in the heat of the moment. Years had passed since they had been together and maybe things should have _changed_ in all that time.

“It’s too cold,” Ryuzo said with a furrowed brow. “Don’t just fall asleep. You want to freeze?”

It didn’t seem like such a bad death, all things considered, Jin thought. He had heard it being described as just falling asleep and never waking up again, read about it in the death poems scattered up Mount Jogaku and he had felt that death's icy clutches back when he'd been climbing it. And it didn't scare him.

“I was praying,” he said, unwilling to admit to Ryuzo that he had fallen asleep at all.

“That’s not how you pray, Jin. Unless your ancestors bestow sleep upon you because you _need_ it that much.”

“Would have been nice of them.” 

Instead, there had just been nothing. The connection was broken, for now. And he was on his own.

He got to his feet, putting his hand on Ryuzo’s shoulder for support while getting up.

“Did yours tell you anything?” he asked, taking his hand away.

He used not to ask because it had always seemed somewhat insensitive to him in the past, but in the end Ryuzo had family on his mother’s side and maybe that worked well enough for him.

Jin was actually curious what they might have been telling him. To find a nice girl, settle down and give them some descendants, finally? _Legitimate ones_? Or could it be something more profound than that? Though, on the other hand, any set of decent ancestors should have long since disowned a traitor like him.

Ryuzo got to his feet as well.

“You think I would have been interested in what they might have had to say to me?” he asked, as if the idea itself was ridiculous. “Dead people?”

As if everyone else, normal people valuing the insight of their ancestors, were just a bunch of gullible idiots.

And Jin felt slightly offended.

But it was to be expected, he thought. Ryuzo had always been _disrespectful_. It was obvious he would be like that toward his own ancestors, too, now that Jin thought about it. And it was also why he’d seen no problem in putting his hands on the jito’s nephew. Or maybe even why he'd specifically wanted him and not any other guy. Not something he should be thinking about all of a sudden, Jin thought, but he still couldn’t help it.

He had always been wondering how big a part of Ryuzo’s attraction to him had come from the thrill of sullying someone of his status, even though he didn’t like to think about that at all, for obvious reasons. And while he might not have been a lord and an heir in a samurai castle anymore, he was the Ghost now, the stuff of legends. And it was the same damn thing. Ryuzo could still fuck him just for the bragging rights and for the _story_ to tell someone somewhere.

Those years when Ryuzo had been gone from his life entirely had been blissfully free of pondering things like that, Jin remembered, and he realized how much he _missed_ that. Nobody else had ever made him feel so on edge about whatever status he had. As if it was going to ruin everything. And as if it was somehow his own fault. He knew other commoners, was friends with them, and they didn’t feel the need to be like that.

A hum of numerous voices and steps could be heard in the distance and they both looked in that direction before Jin spoke up.

"The gate to the fort on the Toyotama side should be open now,” he said. “Go get your horse, Ryuzo. You’ll go out among the other travellers."

"And you think there are just not going to be any problems?" Ryuzo asked. He seemed extremely wary, which he should be, Jin supposed.

"Yesterday, the guards at the checkpoint weren’t stopping anyone who went around it through the grove on the cliff. You’ll go there and wait for me.”

“What if today they will be stopping everyone? Or get interested in me?”

“You’ll figure something out. You want to go to the north? It’s the only way anyway. Not like you can climb well enough to go out of here over the walls. Or sneak through the samurai camp. Or pass through Castle Shimura unnoticed. Not with your face. Here, they may not know it. Most of them haven’t been here long enough. I need to go talk to Takeshi one last time. Then I’ll follow you.”

"You're staying in that armor, Jin?"

“Of course. Why else would I have put it on?”

“I thought you might just sneak out of here and be gone. But that won’t be happening while you’re wearing that _rustling_ thing, right?”

“I asked for one more day of this fort being open myself, so the news that it is closing can spread at least a little bit and so not that many people will get stuck on the wrong side of it. And now I have to deal with the consequences. Go.”

Ryuzo looked hesitant, as if he thought he was in any position to ask any more questions of him. But he didn’t say anything in the end and went away, maybe finally understanding that Jin was not going to divulge his entire plan to him.

\---

By the time Ryuzo went out the gate, the checkpoint was already overwhelmed by crowds, with anyone not saddled with any carts or heavy loads going around it through the grove on the cliff on the other side of the road from the samurai camp. The guards still seemed unperturbed by that happening, just like Jin had said, having their hands full trying to collect some kind of toll from the villagers with the carts.

With his weapons hidden under his cloak, Ryuzo headed for the grove, like several other people at the same time as him. One of the guards still looked right at him, something about his expression changing at the sight. He was wearing clan Oga colors, Ryuzo noted, while holding his gaze not to seem suspicious. He might have remembered something, but he looked away in the end, called by one of his comrades to help settle some dispute already developing with the villagers who were unwilling or unable to pay.

Ryuzo reached the edge of the grove. ‘So far so good’, he thought.

But then something started happening at the checkpoint and his skin crawled. A blood curdling scream, some kind of commotion. He stopped his horse and turned around to look, if only to be prepared if it came his way.

“They dropped a headless body from the tower,” someone said by his side, the information relayed from person to person in a murmur. There was a space in front of the gate now surrounded by people looking down with shock on their faces, even though he couldn’t see the body itself from where he was. But it was not like he hadn’t seen it _before_.

Then the second body was dropped.

“It’s the Ghost," someone said then, gradually joined by a chorus of whispers.

And out of all the ways that Jin could have left that fort, just like Ryuzo had feared, he had apparently chosen going right through that checkpoint.

Clouds of thick smoke engulfed the gate then. And out of that smoke, Jin walked out, wearing the Sakai clan armor without any mask on his face, and with his swords still sheathed, raised his hand and looked right at him.

And Ryuzo’s first reaction was a strong urge to run, which he had to squash in himself. If only because he wanted to see what Jin was going to do about the enemies surrounding him, the kind he supposedly refused to kill.

‘You’re an idiot’, he thought to himself, because he _realized_.

As a Straw Hat ronin, he’d been steering clear of killing samurai. It wasn’t worth the trouble, the other ronin had told him right after he’d joined, and he had stuck by that until the Khan’s bounty had convinced him otherwise. Then he’d lost everything over trying to kill that one.

“One arrow, one death,” Jin said, which Ryuzo could only decipher at that distance because the phrase had been drilled into him during training and he must have seen it spoken hundreds of times.

And whatever Jin's reasons were for not killing samurai, he was apparently fine with him killing some for him.

And this was not really a _choice_ he was given, right? Jin still had a fort full of archers, at least some of them willing to do his bidding, right behind him. And if he misbehaved, they were going to conclude he himself was a spy and shoot him from up there.

Or that would have been what he himself would have done at least.

There was no time for any more reflection than that with Jin standing there, surrounded by six samurai at the checkpoint and a few more in the vicinity. Ryuzo took out his bow and got ready to shoot more on instinct than anything else, his senses switching to assessing the situation.

There was a commotion around Ryuzo to rival any battle but his horse was doing well, keeping still. The samurai were wearing helmets, but not heavy armor, which left plenty of possibilities to hit them. He had eleven arrows, ten of them poisoned, because why not, these days. And any commoners he was going to kill by accident were on Jin.

It shouldn’t have worked. But then he started shooting the arrows one by one and the shock of seeing their comrades double down in pain and die vomiting blood at their feet, _in the Ghost's presence_ , rendered most of the samurai unable to draw their swords. Jin blocked maybe two hits with his katana before he got on his horse, which was conveniently _there_ despite the crowds, and rode away, passing Ryuzo by without so much as a glance.

Having just one regular arrow left at his disposal at that point, Ryuzo considered shooting Jin with it. But that wouldn’t have really made anything better, would it?

And with mounted archers getting onto their horses in the samurai camp, he followed him instead.

They soon started to be chased and Jin left the road and rode through forests and frozen rivers, constantly out of Ryuzo's reach, no matter how hard Ryuzo was trying to catch up to him. It lasted long enough that the sounds of their followers grew distant and then ceased altogether and Ryuzo himself had lost orientation as to where they precisely were.

It was no longer morning by the time some buildings appeared in the distance and Jin finally stopped his horse at the edge of a forest. He was patting its neck encouragingly when Ryuzo caught up to him.

“We'll walk," he said, acknowledging Ryuzo’s presence for the first time then.

Ryuzo wanted answers.

“Later,” Jin said before he could open his mouth to ask anything though.

Then Jin got off his horse and Ryuzo had no other choice but to follow him on foot. 

Having left the horses behind in the forest, they walked into the village, which seemed at least partially abandoned, with no one in sight anywhere, and moved behind the houses. Jin’s armor was making sounds with his every step, the scales fluttering with a metallic rustle, and Ryuzo wondered if any villagers that might have been sitting in their homes were getting spooked by that sound behind their shoji doors.

Nobody confronted them though and they ducked into the first house that appeared to be empty.

“What the fuck, Jin?” Ryuzo asked in a hushed voice immediately after the door shut behind them.

His breath was a cloud in the air. It wasn't any warmer than outside and the house's roof must have been damaged because there was a bit of snow on the floor.

Jin slid down against the opposite wall to sit on the ground, then removed his helmet and put it aside. He looked a lot like his father like that, Ryuzo realized, which was the first time that had ever occurred to him. It used to seem to him that it was never going to happen, that despite the overall similarity, Jin didn’t have it in himself to be as steely-eyed as that man used to be, the way Ryuzo remembered him from his childhood. But Jin could actually make the very same expression at this point. And he looked… _as if you were going to bow before him or die_.

Ryuzo understood some things in that moment. For one, that Jin was not going to just stop being a samurai and that it was not something that could be ever taken away from him, but the very essence of _who_ he was, including all the ugly bits. That being with him was never going to be like being with any other ronin, whatever he was now technically.

And then that _he_ had a master now again, one that could still prove worse than even the Khan.

What is one man burned at the stake to ten of them, poisoned, after all? And Ryuzo actually started wondering about the mathematics of it all. How many Straw Hats had Jin poisoned, and had they been the only Japanese he had ever done it to? Ryuzo wouldn’t have put it past Jin, the way he was now, to have arranged for these numbers not to come out in his favour anymore, after he had pestered him about it one time too many in the past day.

"That was your military training paying off,” Jin finally spoke up. “And I'm sorry. But it had to be done."

Everything Jin had ever done had to have been done, Ryuzo thought. What other people did were largely just mistakes, though.

"You could have told me beforehand," he said, although, all things considered, that would have not worked out in Jin's favor, because he would have refused. For obvious reasons.

“No, I couldn’t have.”

“Because what? You thought that I might have been working for the _shogunate_ now? How could that have ever happened?”

“That was just the one possibility I needed to rule out. I don’t believe that’s the case _now_. But I wouldn't put it past them, or you, for that matter. And you happen to have a very nice horse, Ryuzo. They wouldn’t have been fine with you killing samurai though, not ten of them in one go.”

“I _stole_ that horse from the new arrivals when they showed up here, right in the port. And you would have had me killed if I didn’t shoot them.”

“An arrow to the head. You wouldn’t have survived _that_.”

“Except if I didn’t do this, what would you have done to survive yourself? Those archers at the fort…?”

“They wouldn’t have killed samurai for me, no. It’s a huge deal. Nobody wants the fallout. I would have had to try to deal with them myself. And with my injured arm, probably would have just died trying. But if you were going to keep betraying me and you were dead yourself by then, what would be the point in living?”

It sounded dramatic, Ryuzo thought, but Jin couldn’t have really meant it. There had still been all these bystanders around. Even if Jin had had to fight, the circumstances would have been stacked against anyone trying to use a katana in a crowd, and Jin didn’t even need his second arm all that much to use his tanto.

“It’s a technicality _who_ did it if it was in front of that fort,” Ryuzo pointed out. “And in your presence. What do you think you have even achieved? What’s stopping them from storming that fort now? And executing all those hunters there as revenge?”

“They would have stormed it knowing I was inside. That would have made it worth it for them. And that’s why I needed to come out in the open. The only alternative would have been for all of us to leave onto the southern side, which they have left open for us. But that would have been doing their bidding, with them splitting my forces as they saw fit. And forcing me to go to the north alone. They won’t storm it now. It’s full of bystanders, I’m not there anymore and they already have the losses to show for it. Takeshi’s men will leave among the other travellers in the chaos. And it will be empty by evening anyway.”

“Still, killing ten samurai is one way to start that civil war you said you didn’t want.”

“Or it’d deter them from trying to attack us in the north as if we couldn’t fight back at all. Because everybody has heard that I’m not fighting samurai. Besides, I really needed to have some measure of your loyalty before we go any further...”

That kind of thing was certainly worth the lives of ten men, Ryuzo thought. Then again...

“You did well, Ryuzo,” Jin said, interrupting his thoughts.

And he had always done that, Ryuzo thought, given him this kind of praise that Ryuzo didn’t need and that in fact had always sounded condescending to him. Except it used to be just that silly little thing that Jin had been doing and now it was something else. And Ryuzo was starting to understand what all that _space_ Jin had left between them was meant for.

Jin was waiting after that, not saying anything more, just _being_ there. And he should be aware how much Ryuzo was going to hate it. But maybe that was precisely why he wanted it to happen. And Ryuzo could see that there was no way around it.

He remembered his mother then, hastily teaching him how to bow and kneel before people more important than him when he had been just a few years old, because he had started going to the lords’ estate all the time and it had had to be avoided at all costs that he would have offended anyone there by not bowing or bowing wrong.

It had been a strange place, he had been thinking back then, very much unlike any other house in the village, but Jin had been living there, and Jin had been his best friend, so he had had no choice but to put up with it.

He grit his teeth and moved to prostrate himself before his lord.

“I live to serve you, Lord Sakai,” he said, not looking up at Jin, even though he technically should, just staring at the snow on the floor in front of his face.

This was always supposed to happen, he thought. And he had first spent years preparing for this moment and then done all these things so it wouldn't ever come to pass, but it still did.

At least it was somewhat of his own choice.

Jin got to his feet and walked up to him.

And Ryuzo knew that it wasn’t over yet. That he was still on borrowed time. That Jin was still going to randomly question if he could trust him. While he couldn’t even be trusted himself, not the way he was now.

"We are never going to have the same kind of relationship again as we once had, Ryuzo,” Jin said before kneeling down in front of him. “No matter what you may have been thinking. I will not allow it. I already gave you everything you wanted from me once and you took it and threw it back in my face. I let you have way too much leeway back then. Because I was so young and I didn't know any better.”

Jin's hand landed in his hair. It was heavy, covered in metal.

“Especially at Lord Nagao’s tournament, right?” Ryuzo asked, still staring at the floor. “Lots of leeway.”

He realized Jin was in fact holding him down, applying force onto his head so he couldn't straighten up.

But while the best way to make Jin himself hot and bothered, at least back in the day, used to be putting a hand at the nape of his neck and forcing him face down to the ground, Ryuzo didn't appreciate the treatment and it was just making him angry.

“That was the first time I _didn’t_ give it to you," Jin said, “and you will be bitter about it to the end of our days. You spent years thinking you were somehow stronger than me because what? You got on top of me when we slept with each other? Then you should have just won.”

Jin's fingers tightened in his hair.

"I never did anything to you that you didn't want, Jin," Ryuzo said.

"You also never let me do anything _to you_ that I wanted to.”

"Yes,” Ryuzo agreed.

“And it wouldn’t have _killed you_ ," Jin just sounded sad at that point and his fingers stopped pulling Ryuzo’s hair and started running through it instead.

And Ryuzo supposed that no, it wouldn’t have.

“That is not going to be as much of a problem anymore, though,” he said. “Because I’m no longer such a brat."

Jin's hand stilled in his hair at his words.

“And while I don’t think I take to it as well as you,” Ryuzo continued, “it has already happened. And it can happen again, if you want to."

"You mean there are men around who have fucked you?" Jin asked, sounding quite conflicted about that being the case, but at the same time, as if he could turn furious any moment.

"Not around, I'm pretty sure you already killed all of them," Ryuzo said.

And while it was true, it was also actually funny how many men Jin could wonder about after that statement, he thought. Straw Hats, Mongols, _the Khan_.

Jin's hand was still on his head but it was no longer pressing down and Ryuzo reached for it, laced the fingers of his own hand with it and removed it from there before sitting up.

He looked Jin in the eye, squeezing his hand.

“We’ll talk about it again,” Jin said, his voice strained. "Sometime."

Then he moved away and pulled his hand out of Ryuzo's grasp before getting to his feet.

"I'm sorry, Jin," Ryuzo said before he thought it through.

"I don't need you to be sorry." Jin went to pick up his helmet.

And Ryuzo supposed that was true. Jin was going to do to him whatever he needed to do to him to settle this matter. He didn't need _him_ to be doing anything. Then he stood up as well and started dusting off the snow from his clothes, especially his knees.

They went back to their horses the same way they had arrived and got on them and Jin led the way away from the village and toward the sea.

The weather wasn’t bad, considering it was Kamiagata, Ryuzo observed, although the sky was overcast, and it seemed like it was going to snow some more some time soon. No sign of any storms, at least.

They were going in the direction of Kamiagata Falls, he realized once they were on the road along the coast. Then Jin took a turn onto a path surrounded by burned out pampas grass, and some time later they arrived at what once must have been a village. Most of the buildings were gone though, burned down to nothing, and there were giant holes in the scorched ground between them.

"What happened here?" Ryuzo asked when Jin stopped his horse in the middle of it.

"Mongols shot at it with a trebuchet. From that hill up there,” he said, motioning toward it.

“You were here?”

“I was passing by. I stopped them. There were people here then."

Well, there weren't any people here anymore, Ryuzo thought.

“I need to change out of this armor,” Jin said.

That sounded quite enticing.

“And hide it for now,” Jin continued.

He got off his horse and wandered off to collect firewood then.

Once that was done, Ryuzo followed him to the one half of a building that was still left standing, including the hearth that was still working as intended somehow. Jin must have camped here before, he thought, to be aware of that.

And once the fire was burning and Jin got down to it, Ryuzo watched him remove the Sakai armor piece by piece and then stack it carefully on the floor. And although it didn’t require Jin to get anywhere near naked, it was still nice to watch. And Ryuzo could feel himself getting hard at the sight. But Jin paid no attention to him at all.

He put on the black armor he’d been wearing the previous night and spent some time examining the cut through part on his arm, before going outside and whistling for his horse.

When he came back, he had a sake gourd in his hand.

"I have only one left," he said. He sat down by the hearth at Ryuzo’s side and opened it. "Kii brewery."

"That still exists?" Ryuzo asked, trying not to sound overly enthusiastic.

Jin had liked that sake back in the old days, too, he thought.

"They only needed to run away for a bit,” Jin said.

Then he drank some of the sake before offering the gourd to Ryuzo.

"You drink with traitors?" Ryuzo asked, accepting it nonetheless.

“I killed all your men. We’re even.”

Ryuzo smiled to himself, drinking from the gourd.

"Yesterday, you wouldn’t have agreed that it could work like that,” he said and gave the gourd back to Jin.

Their fingers brushed when Jin was taking it.

“I want to be able to drink with you, if I feel like it,” Jin said. But then he downed the rest of the gourd’s contents in one go, his throat moving in a really eye-catching way as he was swallowing.

So much for drinking with _him_ , Ryuzo thought. It was good sake, too, but it was not getting the appreciation it deserved. And he wondered what was the precise reason Jin had drunk all of it like that.

“Why did you drink all of it yourself?” he asked. “You know what I will have to do now to get any?”

Jin put the gourd down on the ground before turning to look at Ryuzo. He steeled himself for something, Ryuzo thought.

"Do it," he said then.

And Ryuzo didn't need to be asked twice. He slung one arm around Jin's shoulders, going around the armor, and with the other hand took hold of Jin’s chin. He leaned in to kiss him and Jin eased into that kiss immediately and didn't even try to keep his mouth shut like before, as if nothing had ever happened and they were still lovers like all those years ago.

And maybe it could still work, Ryuzo thought in that moment.

Jin tasted of sake. And while he had gulped it down the way he had, Ryuzo decided to savor it second-hand for all it had been worth and started licking it off the inside of Jin's mouth. He was still hard from earlier and he pulled Jin into his lap without breaking the kiss so Jin could feel it. Jin’s hand pressed on his erection through his clothes then for the briefest of moments, but before Ryuzo could catch it and keep it there, Jin was breaking the kiss and moving away.

“Not now,” he said. “We don't have time.”

Ryuzo couldn't even remember _why_.

"You wanted to," he pointed out, realizing it was over.

"Yes, but I only wanted this much." 

Jin was already getting to his feet.

And Ryuzo looked up at him and thought how if 'this much' had taken most of a gourd of sake, that he wasn't sure if he was looking forward to finding out what Jin would have to do to gather his courage for more than that.

‘That's not his problem,’ he thought to himself. 'He's just torturing you. On purpose.'

But there was nothing he could do about that. For now.

\---

“Where are we going?” Ryuzo asked when Jin had set off somewhere on foot. They were now walking along the coast, with the hum of Kamiagata Falls clear in the distance.

And they were supposed to have been in a hurry, Ryuzo thought.

It was snowing, just a little bit, and Jin started climbing down toward the sea over the slippery rocks covered in fresh snow. Hopefully, he was not so badly drunk that he was going to fall and hurt himself.

Well, of course he wasn't.

“Come on,” he called out to Ryuzo over the sound of the waves when Ryuzo didn’t follow him immediately.

It felt as if they were kids again, Ryuzo thought. And he wasn’t convinced that it was a good idea at all to try to walk over those rocks, but Jin was waiting for him, so he had no choice.

“All these coincidences bringing us back together,” Jin said once Ryuzo joined his side a long while later. “You, having survived, and the way we met again at that Mongol camp… You remember that fox we saw back in Kubara?”

Ryuzo did remember it, though it had been years ago, on the day they had first kissed. And Jin hadn't even seemed to be paying much attention to it back then, nor had he ever mentioned it after that, but of course he would remember something like that. Ever since Jin's mother had told him about the foxes, he believed himself to be somehow affiliated with them.

"There is an Inari shrine here," Jin said. "And I have questions."

And there were so many other things they could have been doing instead of going there, Ryuzo thought, even just to prepare for the upcoming fight.

"You think the gods have saddled us with each other, Jin?" he asked. It was the kind of thing that Jin sometimes came up with and however stupid it seemed, Ryuzo had never really mocked him for it. Rather, he used to think that it was very endearing. But after the Mongol invasion, considering Jin’s performance during that time, who knew if Jin's connection to the supernatural, or at least the _natural_ , wasn’t just a fact in the end. “They must be cruel bastards then.”

And he meant it, especially after this morning.

The shrine was on the last rock jutting out into the sea and there were even some candles burning there, though there had been no footprints in the snow as they had been approaching. But they might have been covered up by the snow that was still falling from the sky.

Far in the distance behind the shrine, there was a ship at sea.

“Mongols,” Jin said, his nostrils flaring.

Talk about coincidences, Ryuzo thought.

“They may as well all be dead,” he said.

"You're worried I'll go there and make sure?"

"I'm just warning you. So you wouldn't be disappointed."

“Have you really been there? On one of these ships these days?”

“Yes. And Khenbish is on one even now.”

Jin said nothing about that. Good. Ryuzo didn't need him to be wistful about that guy.

“Will you be praying?” Jin asked him instead.

"You know my interest in these things is limited, Jin.”

“Why the foxes on your swords then?"

Ryuzo didn't expect that question and needed to think about it for a while.

"I did not put them there,” he said in the end. “If anything, they come to me, I don't need to follow them."

"But going to these shrines helps.”

"It helps _you_. And I thought it was because you were the lord and somehow better even for the other side. But in fact, it's probably because you are a demon.”

"You would have never said that back in the old days.”

"But now it's true. If Kojiro was being called one, then you..."

"It doesn’t mean I _am_ one."

“Does that insult you, Jin? I was called one by the Mongols as well when I survived that last fight with you.” And he hadn't felt insulted by that.

"I don't enjoy it when people are afraid of me. Though I can imagine how _you_ may like that."

"I don't mind. You'd better embrace it, too. The way I remember it, your own father wasn't bothered by making people afraid of him. And it only helped him get their respect."

"But he named me Jin. He wanted _me_ to be respected for different reasons than that. And now my ancestors don't talk to me at all..."

"Is that why we're here?"

"Just let me pray."

“Sure."

Jin started praying then, his face scrunching up in concentration.

There were some lights on that Mongol ship, Ryuzo observed in the meantime, even in the middle of the day, and he wasn't sure if that was a good sign or a bad one.

"So, what did you pray for?" he asked once Jin was done.

"I asked them why they have sent you back to me. Other than that... Sleep. Luck. Good deaths for your friends on these ships. You seem worried about them."

"Not really."

"Victory tonight."

"Ah, we should have drunk that sake of yours to _that_."

"I do not regret the way we drank it, Ryuzo."

  



	4. Umugi Cove

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: mention of minor character death
> 
> A/N: I know there are all these more out there theories about what the third sword on the back of the Ghost outfit is but I assume it's just Jin's clan wakizashi.

Around the time of the arrival of all the mainland samurai, Jin was riding his horse through a forest in Otsuna, which was covered in snow at this time of the year, in search of a place to camp, because he was reeking of Mongol blood all over.

It was the middle of the night, though it was fairly light thanks to the cloudless sky and the full moon, its light dispersed by the snow on the ground, which helped him realize that someone had been following him even while he was half-asleep on his horse.

He stopped it and turned around, ready to fight if necessary. He wouldn't have expected to encounter anyone friendly this late at night in the middle of a forest, much less her, away from her turf.

"Lady Sanjo,” he addressed her once he recognized her.

She was accompanied by four ronin on horseback but they had stayed behind when she got close.

"I come in peace, Lord Sakai," she said and showed him her hands. Her left arm was wrapped in starkly white bandages.

“What brings you so far from Umugi Cove?” he asked.

The whole situation was bizarre. It was the first time he was seeing Lady Sanjo out of her room over the tavern in Umugi Cove but he had also seen her a total of three times. She must have been looking for him though to have found him in such a place. And whatever she wanted from him, he wasn't sure if he was willing to give it to her.

She was Kenji’s friend, supposedly, and Kenji, when Jin had asked him about her once, had gotten both very scared and very appreciative at the same time.

“Has the news not reached you yet, Lord Sakai?” she asked. “Umugi Cove is no longer mine. Two days ago, years of my peaceful rule over that place ended. We may have survived the Mongols, but not the arrival of mainlanders. Are you injured?”

“It's not my blood."

He wondered what kind of mainlanders she meant. Umugi Cove being taken over by samurai wasn't a development he would have expected, since it had always had its uses, ruled the way it had been. He had been told as much by his uncle years back and he had seen it later with his own eyes.

"Samurai?" he asked.

“Nobody would have attempted to rule a place like Umugi Cove with samurai," Lady Sanjo said the same thing. "Just a disgraced lord with a bunch of ronin. For some, it won’t be much of a change. As of this morning, it’s not allowed to draw weapons in Umugi Cove again and I bet they mean to bury the bodies quickly and resume the activities there. I’m not sure if any of that concerns you whatsoever though, Lord Sakai. But it just so happens that they also have something of yours.”

Hearing that, he started trying to establish in his head where everyone had been lately, with the answer mostly being Kamiagata. With one glaring exception. He didn't like where this was going but he hoped that he was wrong.

“They let me go with a few of my men who have survived but were also captured," Lady Sanjo said, "but they took over my place, where the Buddha and my other possessions are. They’ll give them back to me if I relay their message to you. My men here happen to be excellent scouts, specialised in Toyotama. That’s how we've found you. And what they want to tell you is that they have the Thief.”

"Yuna?"

With a sinking feeling, Jin thought how that was always going to happen, sooner or later. He had selfishly held onto Yuna’s assistance for all this time, while she should have gone somewhere where nobody would have ever found her a long time ago and certainly after the Khan's death, once Taka had been avenged. At the very least, _she_ deserved a good life after the war, since with the way things had turned out, it seemed like he was never going to have one.

"I do not know her in person," Lady Sanjo said. "But I learned that she was fighting on our side when we were defending our home. And that she was injured and captured."

Jin’s hands tightened around the reins of his horse.

Yuna had set off somewhere a few days ago. They had been together in Toyotama, hunting down Mongol generals who had integrated themselves into the underworld there already. It had been the first time in months that he hadn’t been on his own. And a welcome change. With so few Mongols left and the approaching spring, for a time the situation seemed to have been better than it had been for a long while, too. But then the mainland samurai had started arriving. The two of them had made a trip south all the way to Azamo Bay to survey the port where they had been landing. And it had been then that Yuna had decided to investigate further on her own. Still, Jin hadn't been concerned and he had gone back to Toyotama to get rid of the rest of the Mongols there. Yuna could handle herself. Always had. Saved _him_ , while at it.

But maybe their luck had run out again, he thought, like that time when they had lost Taka. Except this time around... he didn’t really know what he was going to do if he were to lose Yuna, too.

“What do they want?” he asked.

“They might want your head, Lord Sakai. Like I said, I am not their friend. And I do not know that. For now they want you to go to Umugi Cove and meet them."

“Do you have any proof? Or did they just tell you all that?”

“I’ve seen that Yuna with them. You have my word for it. Along with another woman. That one’s named Ichi. She's been living in Umugi Cove those past few months, doing all kinds of jobs.”

Yuna might have gone to Umugi Cove to help Ichi again, Jin thought, at the worst possible moment.

“I expect you’ll be actually going to Umugi Cove now, Lord Sakai?” Lady Sanjo asked. “We're headed there as well now, to hopefully retrieve my possessions. And if, while there, we will be able to be of any assistance to you, we will try to help you.”

“Why?" As far as he understood the situation, that was going to put them in considerable danger. And he didn't have much to offer them in return.

“Because we'd like to become part of your forces, Lord Sakai. _Ghost's_ forces," she added. "I’m not sure if you’ve been aware of that, but I ruled Umugi Cove with your uncle's blessing. And it must have been withdrawn, by him or by someone above him, for this to be allowed to happen. I'm on my own now. These are all the men I have left. A few more escaped and hid somewhere, probably injured, but I don't know if those will ever come back. Kenji can vouch for me, if you don't trust me. And if me and my men prove useful, when one day things change and we will try to get our home back, I'd love to have your sword on our side."

“If you prove useful," Jin said. It might have sounded too harsh, he thought, but he had no time to waste on negotiating with Lady Sanjo. But he could use her help, if she was going to deliver. "Do you know anything I can use?"

“We attempted to learn something, Lord Sakai. But not everything we’ve learned seems, well… true. Let’s stop for a moment and talk some more, shall we?”

What they had learned was mostly a bunch of legends from the mainland, which didn’t bode well, when Jin thought about himself. Or all the other swordsmen whom he’d already fought who had been the subject of songs and tales.

Lady Sanjo had one of her men relay the information. They had lit up a small fire to keep warm but otherwise the situation was tense and Jin wasn’t convinced if his head couldn’t be useful to Lady Sanjo herself as well, despite what she had said. He'd heard various things about her, too, and if it was true that she had had Lord Shimura's support, that arrangement had never been revealed to him.

“The new head of Umugi Cove, Lord Mizuchi, hails from Kanagawa,” Lady Sanjo's ronin said. “The other branch of his clan has a castle there. The story is his brother raped his wife, or they had an affair, or his brother offered assistance to him in getting him an heir since he himself no longer has… because someone cut it off in the past. There are more out there stories, too. Either way, his wife gave birth to a son and killed herself right after over what had happened. And he came up with a revenge plot that spanned two decades. Very excessive. He kept a low profile but at the same time didn’t raise that boy to be a samurai at all, just taught him to kill. And that’s actually not a legend. We’ve seen him kill ten of our men on his own. Not with a bow, with a sword.”

“And it wasn’t a pretty sight,” Lady Sanjo added.

“Then there’s Lady Kiyo," the ronin continued. "It's said that she's a samurai widow. Since she's unmarried she should probably be in a monastery somewhere but instead she’s out and about with them. She carried a naginata in Umugi Cove but we haven’t seen her use it. A few years back the three of them arranged the slaughter of the rest of the Mizuchi clan, which numbered in the dozens back then. It’s impossible to determine how much of that they did with their own hands. The brother survived though. Just him. He’s only lost one eye. They should have all been executed then but it seems like they were too useful to someone for that to happen. There are a lot of things people talk about them having supposedly done in the years since, but who knows how much of that is true. They do not employ retainers but they do have a squad of ronin. The head of those is called Shark Teeth. A very ugly man. But we’ve seen him fight, too. And it was at that point that we decided that the only way for any of us to survive was running away. Some of us probably succeeded. But we were caught."

"Like I told you, Lord Sakai," Lady Sanjo spoke up, "they let us go so we could find you. Which seems to indicate that you are their priority. Unless they're sure they can just capture us again. And that's as much as we know, mostly from talking to pirates."

"And prostitutes," the ronin added. "If that Lady Kiyo is actually that lord's mistress, she isn't _enough_. But strangely enough, these prostitutes haven't learned if his cock is really cut off..."

"That's besides the point," Lady Sanjo interrupted him. "There were always ways to conquer Umugi Cove. We had our defenses, but we were not invincible. And I know how close it had been with the Mongol archers. I still appreciate your assistance back then, Lord Sakai. But I never imagined someone would come and _draw their weapons_ in the middle of Umugi Cove and then just slaughter everyone who came at them. That was a message, too, one that will spread soon. People will start talking. We'll have our own legends about them here. The spirit in some places will be broken, even if they will eventually leave. And it makes one wonder why all these competent swordsmen come to Tsushima _after_ the war. Then again, Lord Shimura wouldn’t have wanted them here back when he was in power, considering what he's done to you, Lord Sakai.”

“If they’re such great swordsmen,” Jin spoke up, “why didn’t one of them just accompany you and challenge me to a duel?”

The ronin started an animated if hushed discussion then about his chances among themselves. Right in front of him.

"Don't mind them." Lady Sanjo spoke up at his side. "If you're asking my opinion, Lord Sakai, they seem like the kind of people who would rather stay _alive_ , all things considered. Since they apparently kept on living throughout all that. And they must be aware of _what_ you are. Maybe they don't want your head after all. They may even offer you the kind of arrangement they have. If you were to get control over Umugi Cove in exchange, I wouldn’t mind. And I’d offer my help.”

“If you want to help me, make sure to arrive there before me,” Jin interrupted her, “and create some kind of diversion while I’m there. Because I’m not going to be striking deals with them.” Certainly not after they'd involved Yuna in the whole thing, he thought.

“Sometimes that’s the only way, Lord Sakai."

"If you value your life too much."

"You don't value yours? You must be very lucky then, to get to keep it this long. What kind of diversion do you have in mind?” 

He took out all the smoke bombs and black powder bombs that he had on him then and gave them all a quick rundown on using them. The ronin appeared to be way more intrigued than Lady Sanjo and truth be told, she struck Jin as the type of person who would have rather _stayed alive_ herself. He would have liked to ask his uncle about her, he thought before he caught himself, because that was of course out of the question.

Her attitude was going to determine if she was going to be of any use to him, though. If any of them lived past that day, that’s it.

They went their separate ways after that and the rest of the journey to Umugi Cove was a blur in Jin’s mind. He decided not to wash off the blood. And he tried not to let himself get angry, thinking how that was not going to help him, not yet.

He arrived at sunrise. There was no snow so far south and Umugi Cove and the surrounding marshes were completely flooded at the end of winter instead, making it only possible to travel on roads and walk on the wooden bridges and walkways.

He left his horse behind, with his bow attached to it, and was escorted inside Umugi Cove by a ronin who talked with an unfamiliar accent but was otherwise looking pretty much the same as the ones who would have been there before. ‘Not much of a change’, Jin remembered Lady Sanjo’s words. And he wondered why Yuna had made the decision to fight protecting Umugi Cove from these people at all. That hadn’t been a situation nowhere near as clear cut as the Mongol invasion and he was indeed not sure if it would have been of any concern to him who was controlling Umugi Cove going forward if Yuna hadn’t gotten involved. What she’d done had been treason, too, which was only going to make another one of them a wanted criminal, even if he managed to free her. But she must have had her reasons.

Inside Umugi Cove, even at this early hour, some men were sailing on boats in the fog, taking dead bodies out of the water and stacking them across some of the walkways. All of them seemed to be the bodies of adult men, Jin observed, which was a nice change after what the Mongols had been doing.

The ronin led him to the tavern, which was completely empty, the way Jin had never seen it ever before, and pointed the way up to Lady Sanjo’s former room.

“Lady Kiyo is waiting,” he said.

The room was empty of Lady Sanjo’s possessions, which were possibly going to be given back to her after all.

A woman was sitting by the hearth, not wearing armor, and with no naginata in sight. Because of the war and the eradication of the Tsushima samurai, it had been a while since Jin had last seen a young woman dressed like her, wearing an elaborate yellow silk kimono and smelling of perfume. That kimono was stained with blood in her lap though, and possibly ruined, but she didn’t seem bothered by that.

Other than her, there was just one man in the room, standing in the shadows in the corner with his arms crossed over his chest, wearing dark blue clan armor. Jin wondered briefly if he was an actual samurai. But in the end, there came a time when things like that ceased to matter. And it might have been that time.

"Please, sit down," Lady Kiyo said.

He sat down opposite her by the hearth but kept his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“You’re covered in blood,” she observed right away, “ _Ghost_. I presume none of it your own.”

No ‘Lord Sakai’ from her, he thought.

“So are you,” he said.

She smiled.

“Your friend’s friend Ichi,” she said, “after being of some assistance to us, asked for permission to commit suicide this morning. Which we granted. We gave her a knife, but the way she did it, she would have been dying all day, to the horror of your friend, I’m sure. So I lent her a hand. It was just a moment ago, too. I had no time to change.”

“Where’s Yuna?”

“She’s been arrested. Because whatever you may have been told by certain criminals, we have arrived here in official capacity, to bring order to this place. And she was among the people who were resisting our efforts. She’s lucky to have survived. And to be of use to us. And now we’ll keep her. And you’ll join us. That is what our orders are. To bring you into the fold and off Tsushima. Because we will leave, too, to wherever else we are needed. We will likely be allowed to keep control of this place though. People who fought the Mongol invaders with you, if they will need to for whatever reason, will be able to come and stay here. With immunity within this place. From what I understand, that is how it has always been done around these parts. The rest of the island is to be ruled by samurai. It is a generous offer, from someone who's way more pragmatic than a lot of other people in power. And you have to realize that you won’t be getting anything better. Forget ever being a samurai again or being allowed to stay on Tsushima, because that won’t be happening.”

“What if I refuse?” he asked, though he could imagine the answer.

“Your friend will get executed. We have not gone and kidnapped her, either. She’s committed a crime here herself. And it’d take a lot to even change her punishment to life imprisonment. And then there will be other consequences as well. Not only to yourself. And even if you die, we'll still do what we’ll have to do. Because we have no choice ourselves."

Yuna would have never agreed to such an arrangement, Jin thought. She was not the kind of person to consent to life in captivity, especially just to keep some man in check, even if it was him. And the two of them were either going to have to break free somehow or die. At least the Mongols had been nearly defeated, he thought, with only one camp left in Izuhara. Easy enough to wipe out, even with both of them gone.

"I need to see her first," he said. From there, he would have to count on his luck or on Lady Sanjo and her men. Preferably, a combination of both.

"You'd have to leave your weapons with the young master here," Lady Kiyo motioned toward the man in the corner of the room. “As far as I know, Lord Mizuchi is with your friend right now, explaining it to _her_. Which is quite an honor, seeing as she’s just a commoner.”

Jin doubted that Yuna was impressed.

He put his katana, wakizashi and tanto in a line on the floor by the hearth, saying his goodbyes to his swords in his thoughts. Then he took out his kunai. And then he sat back down.

“All the other things, too,” Lady Kiyo spoke up when he did that. “Everything. We’ve heard that you have no honor but have some _decency_ at least. Unless you want us to search you.”

She might have meant the lack of explosives, he thought. Or his unwillingness to part with his kaginawa, which was technically not a weapon.

“That’s everything,” he said.

“Maybe he wouldn’t mind you searching him,” the man in the corner of the room spoke up, before walking up to the hearth to take Jin's swords. “Let him be,” he added.

He went away with Jin's swords first and then Lady Kiyo led Jin out of the building. Eight ronin surrounded them on the road to wherever Yuna was being held.

It was still quiet in Umugi Cove. No sign of Lady Sanjo or her men anywhere.

“I heard this island was very beautiful,” Lady Kiyo spoke up at Jin's side as they were walking. “But not this part of it, right? Not at this time of the year at least.”

It wasn’t a beautiful day, Jin thought. It was cold, barely above freezing, but it felt colder because of the humidity. The sky was overcast and the morning fog was thick over the water. But that was for the better. Umugi Cove was the kind of place with plenty of opportunities to hide at any time and the fog only helped. If he was lucky, that was going to work to his advantage soon.

He was eventually led into what looked like a regular house by just one of the ronin, with Lady Kiyo and the rest of them staying outside the shoji door. Yuna was there, her skin pale and clammy even in the half darkness inside the building, but not visibly injured. Her wounds must have been under her clothes. She was accompanied only by another man in that dark blue clan armor, except a more elaborate one. He was a generation older than the other one and very thin, his skin stretched right over the sharp bones of his face.

“Lord Mizuchi here has a deal for you, Jin,” Yuna spoke up as soon as she saw him and Jin could tell that she had been trying to sound somewhat indifferent, probably so that Lord Mizuchi wouldn't get any ideas about how much they meant to each other, but the way she had said his name had still been incredibly tender, at least to his ear.

“So I’ve heard,” he said.

An explosion shook the building then, with screams and commotion following outside.

The ronin standing next to Jin froze in place, half-turned toward the door. Not likely that he had ever encountered something like this on the mainland, Jin thought, and took a step behind him to unsheathe the ronin’s own sword. He plunged it through his back as soon as he had it in his hand, took his tanto for Yuna, dislodged the sword and pushed the body aside.

Except in that time Lord Mizuchi had gotten to his feet with Yuna in his grasp and a knife to her throat and he was now walking backward toward the other door in the back of the house, dragging her with him. She looked as if she was in pain and Jin could feel himself losing his cool completely at the sight, his hand tightening around the hilt of the sword in his hand.

“Run,” Yuna mouthed despite her obvious pain.

Her command grounded him a bit, because he would have attacked otherwise, ignoring the risk to her. Before the rest of the ronin standing outside the door could burst inside, he left through a window on the side of the house.

Only to be knocked down to the ground after taking two steps behind some crates there by someone _jumping down from the roof_.

That was always going to happen one day, too, he thought, landing face first in the mud. He tasted blood in his mouth, a lot of it, but he wasn’t sure if it was from something having been broken inside him by the impact or just a cut.

A knee was pressed to his back, putting pressure right on the few of his ribs that had just been either bruised or broken. The air had been knocked out of him and when he tried to pick himself up, he fell back down to the ground immediately, barely able to keep his head above the mud.

"I see you're armed already." It was the man from earlier, Jin thought, recognizing his voice. "But you might still prefer your own swords." He put the Sakai katana and tanto on the ground just out of Jin's reach.

And Jin wondered what his point was, while trying to reach the swords, even if it was useless to try.

"Give a warrior’s death to Lord Mizuchi,” the man said above him. “And you can go away."

He was gone then, long before Jin could make himself get up. He’d either disappeared in the fog or gone up onto the roofs again, Jin thought, surveying his surroundings once he managed to get back to his feet, holding onto the wall of the house behind him for support. He let go of that wall tentatively and spit out the blood onto the ground and it didn’t seem to him that he was seriously injured. He picked up his swords from the ground and put them back in their place. He now had two sets, though he was still missing his clan wakizashi. But that was the least of his problems.

He wiped the mud off his face with the sleeve on his inner forearm since his arm and hand were encased in armor otherwise and climbed onto the roof to have a look around. Thankfully, it was empty. From above, he saw the ronin running around, searching for him. The explosion had happened in another house down the road and there were some injured men lying on the walkway in front of it, but it was impossible to tell from which side they were. Lady Kiyo was gone somewhere, possibly inside the building under his feet. And on that building's other side, Lord Mizuchi was walking away, dragging Yuna with him but with no knife at her throat anymore.

She was barely struggling, probably too weak to do so.

And Jin would have given a lot to have a bow and arrows with him in that moment, if only to stop that man from hurting her. But having no other weapons but swords on him, his options were limited either way. Even forgetting about that ‘warrior’s death’.

"Lord Mizuchi," he called out.

And then he got down from the roof and walked up to that man, unsheathing the Sakai katana.

\---

He couldn’t really recall what had happened after that.

Other than nearly chopping that man's head off, eventually, his muscles burning from the effort. He had barely stopped himself. And he nearly retched at the memory now. But it meant he must have won. And maybe he was just nauseous after having woken up injured.

“Jin?”

It was Yuna's voice, he thought, calling him back to the world of the living. Again.

He opened his eyes.

It was pretty dark where he was. And he was very thirsty. A significant amount of time must have passed with him unconscious, time he had been unaware of, a nearly foreign concept to him after the past few months when he'd been only sleeping for a few minutes at a time.

Yuna appeared in his field of vision and he tried to get up, but she held him down. Easily. He had no strength at all. Hopefully they were somewhere safe.

“It's too soon," she said. "Don’t sit up. We’re safe. But I told you so many times not to do that. There are other ways than just rushing at someone with a sword. Why did you duel that man?”

“I won, didn't I?” he asked, since that settled the matter for him.

“You don’t remember?”

Apparently, he hadn't sounded sure enough, he thought.

“You don’t remember, Lord Sakai," Lady Sanjo spoke up somewhere to their side, "because you must have gone into that fight with a rib puncturing your lung. And it went downhill from there."

Jin looked around, as much as he was able to while lying flat on his back, and realized they were in that weird kind of house that was built in Toyotama that was all roof, with no windows, other than the two uncovered holes high under the ceiling, with two entrances, one of them very low. Lady Sanjo’s Buddha statue was standing next to the wall, the only remarkable thing he could see.

“He cut you right away when you walked up to him,” Yuna said. “And then on your stomach. Very badly. There was so much blood that I thought you were going to die.”

Jin put his hand on his stomach, feeling the thick layers of bandages there.

"Through the armor?" he asked.

"It gave way eventually. It's badly damaged."

"I'll have it repaired," he assured her.

“But you killed him in the end,” Yuna continued.

“And then we all left,” Lady Sanjo added, “with someone shooting arrows at our pursuers from the roofs. You happen to know anything about that, Lord Sakai?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Where’s my horse?”

“Here,” Yuna answered. “It followed us. I’m not sure why. You, and your way with animals, I guess.”

“Where is here?” he asked. 

He was looking at Yuna but _she_ didn’t answer.

“Mamushi Farmstead,” Lady Sanjo did instead. “It's abandoned,” she added quickly, as if she knew she needed to justify that. “Off-putting, because of all the dead bodies. Nobody comes here. My men decided that it was the best option.”

“The marshes are flooded,” Yuna finally spoke up. “It was difficult enough travelling undetected up to here, from what I've heard.”

“With two people in such bad shape as you two,” Lady Sanjo added. “One of my ronin has been injured, too.”

“It’s fine, Jin,” Yuna tried to assure him but he wasn't convinced. “I know there’s nothing here _anymore_ ,” she didn’t sound convinced of that either. "We've dealt with it already."

Jin didn't want her to be in this place either way. He thought of getting up again so they could go somewhere else but couldn’t muster the strength for the second time at all.

Strangely enough, Lady Sanjo scooted over closer to Yuna, reached out for her hand and squeezed it.

Things had happened while he’d been out of it, he thought.

“I need to talk to Jin in private,” Yuna said then.

Lady Sanjo nodded. She collected her katana from the floor and put it in her obi, took a bowl of dirty water and some rags with her and left.

There was another goza mat by Jin’s side and Yuna lay down there. Jin turned to look at her, despite how painful it was to do that. He was still thirsty but Yuna was probably not the person to ask for water, he thought. She had been injured herself. And she looked exhausted.

“Are you in pain?” he asked her.

“Are you?” she asked back.

"Not really." He was starting to be, but it wasn't that bad, he supposed.

“I had a fever back in Umugi Cove and for one more day here, but I’m better now, just weak. You had it worse. But I hope between me and Lady Sanjo, we have managed to put you back together well enough.”

“You trust her?”

“Lady Sanjo? We have no choice but to trust her for now, Jin. But yes, pretty much. She wants to go to the north with us. And I’d take her.”

“I'm sorry about Ichi."

"You know about Ichi?"

"They told me."

"I'm sorry, too. But it was her decision in the end. She felt guilty for talking to them, which is how they knew who I was. But I wouldn't have blamed her. She must have been very scared. The one you killed was somewhat disturbing."

"You went to Umugi Cove for her?"

"I went to Umugi Cove when I heard it was being attacked for the Umugi Cove the way I remembered it. I think we never talked about it, but I liked it. I mean, that's understandable. I am a thief after all. I didn't want it to stop existing. But in the end I'm not you, I can't single-handedly change an outcome of a battle. I'm just glad we've both survived."

"You should have told them to take us somewhere else, though.”

“I was in no shape to tell anyone anything. And it’s fine now. It’s just that… The same thing happened again when we came here at first. I just stopped breathing. Lady Sanjo helped me with that. And even if I was only into men, I would have still appreciated her assistance. And I hope you can understand that.”

Jin wasn’t sure if she meant what he thought she meant. But then he thought back to Lady Sanjo squeezing her hand.

“How long have we been here?” he asked.

“Four days."

Way longer than he would have expected.

“Has she told you her first name already?” he asked.

Yuna snorted.

“You’re funny, Jin,” she said. “Maybe she did. But it's not a serious thing. She's been spending a lot of time with one of those ronin who came here with us, too. The cutest one."

"How am I supposed to tell which one that is?"

"Well, actually…"

Yuna grew quiet for a long time then, though her eyes stayed open. But she might have just gotten too tired to talk, Jin thought.

"Taka told me you liked men," she said in the end. "He… as well..."

"I know."

He wasn’t sure if they should be talking about Taka, on top of everything, though. Or that, for that matter.

"Then he should have known, right?" she asked.

"Right," he agreed. "But I never _knew_ you were discussing things like that between you two."

"But of course we did. We were both smitten with you, at one time. Then we calmed down a bit but… back when you were becoming the Ghost..."

“I could tell."

"You could tell?! About us both? Then why didn’t you do anything?”

"I waited it out," he turned back to stare at the ceiling. "It was the middle of the war." Not that he hadn't been tempted. But back then Ryuzo had still been around. He had been supposed to join them when they'd gone to free Castle Kaneda. And maybe then...

"If you could just wait it out because it was 'the middle of the war', then it just wasn't meant to be. In either case, right?"

"In either case.” Jin could remember Taka’s eyes on him, looking at every inch of him way more closely than necessary, after Ryuzo's betrayal as well. But then he wouldn't have acted on it either because he would have never wanted to involve someone like Taka in the mess these things were for him. Then Taka had died and the mood had changed. But that didn't mean... "But I do love you, Yuna." He wasn't sure why he said that, but he supposed that it was true.

"Oh, I know," she just agreed. "I don't doubt that. Not after what’s happened. It's just that… Well, never mind. Let’s sleep for a bit.”

“You know I can't sleep.”

“Then at least give it a try. Maybe you’re still exhausted enough.”

He was still thirsty. But then she put her hand over his and fell asleep a moment later by his side and while he could only hover between consciousness and unconsciousness, ready to wake up at any moment, he took care to stay completely still so as not to disturb her. She wasn’t the best sleeper either and she got nightmares if disturbed in the slightest. And she must have been even more on edge _here_.

They needed to move as soon as possible.

More memories of the duel were coming back to him, gradually. But they were all made of pain and despair and he wasn’t even sure if he wanted them at all. There was nothing to learn there on the technical level, either. He’d been too angry for that. It had been a while since he’d been in a fight with this kind of immediate stakes, he thought, other than his own life. Not since the Khan, he supposed. But even then the situation had been different.

‘When was the last time you needed to save someone this important to you?’ he thought to himself. And he could only think back to his father's death somehow. And saving Ryuzo from that giant Mongol on that ship where they’d gone to look for food for his men.

Not anything he would have liked to think about. Both of them were dead in the end. Because of him.

\---

After a few more days of rest, he was able to ride a horse again. Up to that point, Lady Sanjo’s ronin, the three uninjured ones, had been both doing all the patrolling around the perimeter of the farmstead and had been hunting for food for all of them. He took over the hunting part from them entirely to ease himself back into activity. And it was during a hunt that he discovered an abandoned shed by a hot spring in a forest close by.

Yuna had been sulking in dark corners mostly in the Mamushi Farmstead, avoiding going outside at all, and this seemed like a much better place. Travelling such a short distance wasn’t going to tire her out either, he hoped. They moved the very next day, both riding on his horse, since hers had been lost in Umugi Cove. Lady Sanjo had stayed behind with her men but she had promised to pay them a visit.

When she did, the next evening, Jin wandered away on foot to give her and Yuna some privacy. He came back late at night and climbed onto the roof of the shed, assuming that Yuna and Lady Sanjo must have been inside or that Lady Sanjo had already left. But then he saw from above that her horse was still grazing nearby.

He heard their voices then, talking quietly, and realized that they were in the hot spring. He should have probably left again, he thought, but he was also already exhausted, since he was still recovering from his injuries, and he didn't feel like moving anymore, so he lay down on the roof instead and started staring up at the stars pointedly, _not looking_ , in case there was anything to see.

“Where is Lord Sakai anyway?” he heard Lady Sanjo ask eventually.

“Jin? Around. Probably,” Yuna answered her.

“Maybe we should ask him to join in sometime,” Lady Sanjo said with a giggle that was, Jin felt, not something he was meant to hear.

“That wouldn’t go over well,” Yuna said right away.

And he honestly wondered _why_ she was so sure of that.

“So, most of Tsushima thinks you two are together,” Lady Sanjo said, “but there's actually someone else.”

“Most of Tsushima is interested in that?” Yuna sounded sceptical. “My guess is more like there _was_. All those samurai that perished in Komoda. I’d look there.”

‘And you’d be close,’ Jin thought to himself. 'But not close enough.'

“Jito’s nephew, in love with another man?” Lady Sanjo asked.

“But doesn’t it happen all the time?” Yuna asked back.

They stopped talking then and whatever they were doing, Jin thought back to another cold night several years ago, in that hot spring in Kubara that was fairly close to Castle Shimura that he used to like so much before it got tainted with the wrong kind of memories.

It was the end of winter back then, too, he thought. A high point of his relationship with Ryuzo. They had been fucking for months but it was before Ryuzo had started pushing him away for real. They had sneaked out of the castle somehow yet again, he could no longer remember how.

The warmth of the water in the hot spring was divine after walking through knee high snow to get there.

“What are you staring at, Jin?” Ryuzo asked him from where he was sitting on the other side of the hot spring. “If you want something, just ask.”

If only it could be that simple, Jin thought to himself back then, since he’d already learnt at that point that there were a lot of things that he was actually _not_ supposed to ask for. And that if he was too persistent, he was going to learn from the rumors circulating around Castle Shimura the next day which servant girl exactly Ryuzo had spent the previous night with.

“I…” he opened his mouth but the words weren’t coming out.

“Come here,” Ryuzo said.

Jin didn’t want to because that was going to result in him being bent over the stones at the edge of the hot spring, taken from behind with Ryuzo’s hand around his throat like last time and while the idea was making him hard, he wanted…

“Can I… with my mouth?” he blurted out in the end.

“You want to suck me off?” Ryuzo guessed correctly right away but looked at him _sceptically_.

Which only served to make Jin want it _more_.

“You must have had it done to you already,” Jin pointed out, because he was pretty sure of that.

“Not by a guy. And you know I’ll never do it to _you_.”

“That’s fine.”

“It’s not really _fun_ for the other party, either, from what I’ve heard.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But then you won’t like it and you will take it out on me. Though maybe that’d be better. I don’t appreciate you going easy on me when we train.”

“I don’t do that.”

“You do, Jin. Probably because… Ah well. Fine,” Ryuzo said in the end and climbed partway out of the hot spring and sat on its edge with his legs open. “Don’t bite.”

He wasn’t even hard, Jin thought, moving toward Ryuzo in the water, his own erection heavy between his legs. He leaned in and gave the head of Ryuzo’s cock a tentative lick before taking it into his hand and stroking it for a bit so it’d lengthen and grow hard.

“I’m cold,” Ryuzo complained before he even took him into his mouth.

And when he did, Ryuzo’s hand was on his head immediately, pushing it down way too far for comfort, with Jin not only gagging, but seeing _black_.

“If you don’t want that done to you,” Ryuzo said as if they were having a conversation, “keep a hand at the base so it can’t go that deep no matter what.”

Jin did, after that, though he wasn’t really learning this for anyone’s benefit but Ryuzo’s own and Ryuzo could have just shown some restraint.

He managed some kind of up and down motion and a rhythm after a while, but then it was taking too damn long and Ryuzo didn’t even seem particularly impressed, except when Jin managed to take him deep into his throat, which he couldn’t really do yet. He didn’t feel like giving up anyway.

But Ryuzo got impatient in the end and grabbed his hair to pull his head back so that his cock slid out of Jin's mouth and pushed _him_ back against the edge of the hot spring. Jin opened his mouth to protest but Ryuzo looked him in the eye and pushed his cock back inside it with him on top. Jin considered what to do with his hands. He wanted them on Ryuzo but he also needed them for support behind him. They should have stayed in the castle, he thought then, on a futon. Though that was risky in its own right.

"Shh, it will be easier for you," Ryuzo said, cradling the back of Jin's head and keeping it steady while he drove himself into his mouth.

It _was_ easier, Jin supposed, though maybe not what he had had in mind. But there was something about the way Ryuzo’s hand was holding the back of his head, trembling as he was nearing release, that he still enjoyed. It only took Ryuzo a few thrusts to come into his throat, too, and while Jin had been hesitant about that part beforehand, he swallowed it all easily without tasting much of anything.

Ryuzo withdrew from his mouth then, grabbed his chin and _turned his head sideways_ and Jin didn’t really know what for until he opened his eyes.

“We have company,” Ryuzo said to him.

It was one of the recruits from the castle, Jin thought, recognizing him, a bit older than them, as far as he knew. He couldn’t recall his name at all.

The guy was staring at them from where he was standing, wide-eyed.

Ryuzo was still holding onto Jin’s chin.

“Are you sure what you’ve seen?” he addressed the guy. “Lord Sakai, sucking another man’s cock. And I hope you took a good look, because it will be the last thing you’ll see in your life.”

Jin thought how he should have probably protested when Ryuzo let him go, got out from the hot spring, picked up one of their katanas lying next to it, unsheathed it, dropped the scabbard and went to the guy, who was frozen in place throughout all that, even though he was armed, and then just cut him down before the guy drew his own sword, his blood spraying on Ryuzo and his hand dropping from where it had been hovering over his sword’s hilt as his body slid down to the ground.

Only after the fact did Jin realize that Ryuzo had done that with the Sakai katana instead of his own sword.

“Get out,” Ryuzo said to him as he walked back toward the hot spring.

Jin did and Ryuzo forced the bloodied sword into his hand.

“Why did you do that?” Jin asked.

“What? You’d prefer for him to go back to the castle and tell everyone? He was so curious he followed us here.”

And Ryuzo had apparently _known_ about him having been there for some time, Jin thought.

“That is not how you kill someone honorably,” he said, though he wasn’t convinced if all _that_ was even applicable to a situation like this.

“Yeah, thankfully, I’m not a samurai. And since you’re one and you couldn’t contribute anything useful to that situation, you’ll clean the sword.”

Ryuzo started getting dressed then and Jin supposed that was what he should have been doing, too, though there were still things he wanted to say, but didn’t really feel able to put into words. He put on his clothes and wiped down the blood from his katana before sheathing it for now, thinking how unexplainable that was going to be to his ancestors when he would inevitably have to make amends for having disrespected his clan sword.

Ryuzo went to the guy's body and kneeled down to search it.

“He doesn’t even have any money," he said once he was done, having found nothing. "Why are we all so damn poor…” he muttered.

“You’ll just leave him here?” Jin asked him when he started walking away.

“Yes?” Ryuzo said over his shoulder. “That is why you don’t wander in the woods at night alone, you know? Unless you can actually use your sword."

“Ryuzo…”

“What?”

“What would you do if I did it with another guy?” Jin didn’t really know why he was asking, but there was something about that situation that had pushed him to it. Though he could imagine the answer. But he also wanted to hear it.

“What, indeed.” Ryuzo stopped walking and turned around. He smiled. And it was not a good-natured smile at all. Especially since he was still sprayed with blood. “Just don’t do that, Jin. It’s not as fun with every single person you try it with anyway. You’d choose wrong and it’d just hurt. And either way, it won’t make you any happier.”

It sounded more like a warning than anything, Jin thought.

“Though maybe…” Ryuzo seemed to be thinking about something. He came closer and stopped right in front of Jin, forcing him to look up at him. “If your uncle actually helped you find an older man, a samurai, the way it’s sometimes done... Maybe then you could sort out some of your _issues_. But I’d still kill him.”

“I don’t have issues.”

“Sure you don’t.”

Then Ryuzo kissed him and it was surprisingly tender and slow, considering the circumstances, and the dead body at their feet.

\---

He must have fallen asleep for a bit then because when he opened his eyes, Yuriko was sitting by his side on the roof, years younger than she’d been when she’d died.

He had been seeing her like that surprisingly often, as if she couldn’t let go of him and move on.

That hadn’t been happening after the deaths of his parents, he thought, but didn’t really know what to make of that observation.

“You still miss him,” Yuriko said, not looking at him, but at the hot spring down below. Which was empty.

And to an extent Jin didn’t know if she meant Ryuzo because of what he’d been thinking about earlier or his father, after what she had told him before her death.

“Who?” he asked, sitting up.

“Your first friend.”

“It’s been a while since he’s been my ‘friend’, Yuriko.”

“Oh, I know.”

She knew one part of it, he supposed. He had never told her about Ryuzo’s betrayal. But she at least used to know that they had been _more_ than just friends for a time, except while alive she had apparently forgotten about it down the line.

With how reckless they had been, Jin was surprised even more people hadn’t found out. It probably helped that it had only lasted a few months in its full blown form. And that they had then spent years pretending that it had never happened at all.

“Maybe you should look for him,” Yuriko said.

“He’s dead.”

“Oh, is he?” she asked, as if that was somehow impossible.

\---

He woke up for real after that because someone was talking in front of the shed. He must have slept for longer than usual, he thought, and it confused him. He’d had all these dreams, too. And he was still hard from the one about Ryuzo, though it felt very wrong. He was sometimes amazed at his own stupidity back then.

Lady Sanjo was apparently leaving now, getting onto her horse.

Once she rode away, Yuna went inside the shed. And it was at that point that Jin decided to get down from the roof and follow her.

“Where have you been, Jin?” she asked him when he went inside.

She was already sitting next to the wall, covering herself with a fur for the night. It was almost completely dark indoors, but he could make out as much.

“I was waiting for her to leave,” he said.

“I figured as much. She wanted to stay. But then you would have spent the night outside.”

“I spend most nights outside, Yuna.”

“But you’re not even recovered yet. Come here.”

He sat down next to her and she put the fur over him, too.

“I want to go to Izuhara,” he said once he was settled.

“To wipe out that last Mongol camp? It’s way too soon for you.”

“To investigate, for now. I got a hold of some Mongol orders in Toyotama after you left. Addressed to the generals on these ships docked along the coast. I’d like to find out what’s that about.”

“I’ll go with you, then.”

“You can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to spend some time at that camp. You’ve seen yourself how the Mongols are cooperating with the Japanese now. And while they may be nearly gone from here for now, there are all kinds of things to learn from them still.”

“It’s too risky.” 

“I’ve spent enough time in these camps already to make it work. And they’re not as bold anymore anyway...”

“Please, Jin…”

“It’s a way to pass the time. Until I heal and the Ghost armor is repaired. I’ll go talk to Lady Sanjo in the morning. She’ll accompany you to Jogaku." He would have gladly sent Yuna somewhere _safer_ than that but with Umugi Cove the way it was now, that might not have been as easy anymore. "I’ll stay in the south until Takeshi’s people leave Fort Kaminodake, in case they’d need my assistance. And then I’ll join you in Kamiagata.”

“With all these samurai everywhere…”

"I still have a feeling Mongols are mine. And these samurai won’t touch that camp at all.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What’s happening now is not worse than the Mongol invasion, Yuna. And we’ve survived that. It'll be fine.”

She sighed.

“There’s no talking you out of it, right?" she asked. "At least promise me you won’t die. Not now.”

"We’ll see each other in the spring. I won't be dying yet,” he said, without thinking about it too hard.

\---

He had been right about the samurai leaving all the Mongols for him. He spent a month in that last camp undisturbed, recovered from his injuries, learned all kinds of things. Slept with the enemy. It was that kind of downtime when he finally allowed that to happen, though he would have agreed that his choice of a man to do it with might have been controversial. But more than anything, he didn’t want any questions, and he and that man couldn’t even really talk because of the language barrier, which assured that well enough.

He heard that there was another Japanese on a Mongol ship nearby. Nobody at the camp could remember his name, though. And they said that he might have starved in the meantime.

Then the time was up and he put the Ghost mask on, slaughtered everyone but Khenbish and left. But he came back, looking for something. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure _what_.

It seemed to him that there was something about the whole situation he should have paid more attention to. He thought he saw Ryuzo in that camp on that night, too, but, well, he did _see people who weren’t real sometimes_. Though he didn’t really feel like seeing much more of that one.

Then he went to Omi, started writing a death poem while there, but stopped. If only because he’d promised Yuna he wouldn’t die.

Then he headed to Komoda Beach.

It had been a while since he had last gone there.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, that was all a flashback to right before the first chapter.


	5. Kamiagata Falls

When Ryuzo followed Jin back from the Inari shrine to the burned down village, the sun was already low over the horizon. It had stopped snowing and the sky had gradually cleared in the meantime and the snow on the ground took on a golden hue, with their shadows stretching long over it.

Jin hid the Sakai armor in the remnants of one of the buildings and whistled for his horse once he was done.

“You will leave that armor here?” Ryuzo asked. _He_ was uneasy about Jin doing that and it wasn't even _his_ clan armor, though he had to admit that he felt a kind of attachment to it, too.

“For now,” Jin said. “It's not like I have a choice. I’ll move it to Cedar Temple as soon as possible. Maybe take it to Jogaku eventually."

“You think nobody will find it until then?”

“Here? Not likely. Not before spring. And if someone does, they’ll either give it back to me, or I’ll get it back.”

'It really is that simple', Ryuzo thought, ‘if you’re him.’

Jin’s horse approached them. It was blending in well with its surroundings in the snow-covered Kamiagata, Ryuzo noted, and maybe that was precisely what it was meant for. Once it stopped next to them, Jin took the bow that had been attached to its side.

“I have a Japanese bow for you,” he said, giving it to Ryuzo.

It was not the kind that a samurai would have been using, Ryuzo observed, taking a good look at it for the first time, but he supposed that it was still serviceable.

“You took it from the fort?" he asked. "You know whose it might have been? They executed all those archers there.”

“Does it bother you?" Once Ryuzo took the bow from him, Jin gave him a quiver full of arrows to go with it. "That it might have belonged to someone who was executed for being a spy? You already took the furs of those men that I beheaded there. And it’s still an improvement over the Mongol bow you have. If only because the arrows for that one will be getting more and more difficult to come by. And you’re already down to just one.”

‘No thanks to you,’ Ryuzo thought. After using the Mongol bow for months, the Japanese one felt both familiar and strange at the same time in his hands. 

“Have you tried using a Japanese bow at all after that injury?” Jin asked, looking at him closely and probably noticing his hesitation. He had conveniently omitted the nature of ‘that injury’ entirely.

“No," Ryuzo said with a shrug. "I never bothered searching for one. And I was bored. I taught myself Mongol archery just to kill time.”

Jin’s eyes narrowed.

“You wouldn’t have been so _bored_ if you had been fighting Mongols by my side.”

Ryuzo wondered why Jin had said that. They had just been on pretty good terms, all things considered, and Jin had even been wondering why some higher power wanted the two of them together again, as if he was planning for them to try to be together in some way, but now he was...

“I suppose I wouldn’t have been bored then, Lord Sakai," Ryuzo said, " but it’s not like we can change the past. And I do hope for some excitement by your side now. Of various kinds.”

He looked Jin in the eye but couldn’t really tell what he was thinking. And Jin used to be so much easier to read. Ryuzo was missing those times a bit.

“Focus for now, Ryuzo," Jin said, breaking eye contact. "Get used to shooting that bow, at least a little bit. And show me your sword.”

“What for?” 

“Because I want to take a look at it.”

“You think I can’t take care of my sword?” 

Too bad that Jin’s hunch had been correct, Ryuzo thought, not getting bashful over it though, just angry. His katana hadn’t been getting much use for months, other than when he'd been training by himself, getting himself back into shape and maintaining his skills half-heartedly, mostly just to kill time as well. The conditions on the Mongol ship hadn't been the best for storing it either. And neither had he cleaned it properly yet after cutting down that bandit in the woods around Omi Village, though he supposed he should have done that back at the fort. “I did what I could."

“It doesn’t matter to me what you did or didn’t do with it. I just need it to work now.”

“Then take it.”

Jin looked at him sceptically, since holding a bow and a quiver wasn’t quite enough of a reason for Ryuzo not to be able to just give it to him himself, but then he leaned closer and took it out of his obi, without touching anything he didn't need to touch, which Ryuzo supposed was to be expected from him, however underwhelming it was. 

Once he had Ryuzo’s katana in his hands, Jin ran his fingers over the silver fox on the scabbard, a gesture Ryuzo didn't appreciate. He had always had that weird feeling whenever Jin had gotten too close to his sword, that it had somehow suited Jin better than him, as if he wasn't _good enough_ for it, though of course Jin wouldn’t have wanted it or needed it anyway. He had had his own clan swords since he’d been a boy.

"Don't look at me like that," Jin said, apparently feeling his gaze on him. He unsheathed the sword and looked at the blade in the light of the setting sun.

It was stained, Ryuzo could tell as much as well, even from where he was standing. 

“It's rusting," Jin sounded, well... disappointed. And it felt hurtful somehow. "You shouldn't have let it happen." 

"Don't lecture me. It's because of the humidity and the salt on the ship. The oils Mongols used for theirs didn’t seem to agree with it either.”

“Then you should have gotten a hold of the kind _we_ use." Jin sheathed the katana but wasn’t giving it back.

“I should have,” Ryuzo agreed. It was just that for a time it had seemed to him that he wasn't going to be using that katana all that much ever again, even if using it was most of what he could do. And at some point it had become difficult to make himself care. “But I had other things on my mind.”

“You've just said you had been bored. So which is it?"

Ryuzo didn't feel like explaining it to Jin. And he might have already said too much. Obviously, the time when he had been recovering after their fight, stuck in a Mongol camp surrounded by Mongols who hadn’t spoken any Japanese well before he himself had picked up enough Mongolian to get by, hadn't been the best time of his life. And Jin should have been able to understand as much, no matter how convinced he was that he had _deserved_ that.

"It needs to be taken to a swordsmith," Jin said, still holding onto Ryuzo's sword.

"Too bad I don't have any money to pay for one then."

"You’ll do well tonight and I'll pay. It’s too nice to leave it like this. And I’ll clean it now. Your tanto, too." He extended his hand.

Ryuzo gave him his tanto with a scowl. Which he supposed was kind of rude considering what Jin had just offered to do for him. But it was also not like he’d _asked_ him for it.

"Start shooting.” Jin took the tanto and started walking away.

“You never cleaned my swords for me before, Lord Sakai,” Ryuzo called out after him. 

Jin stopped.

“I did,” he said, turning to look at Ryuzo over his shoulder. “That one time when you had taken my sword and used it to kill someone. You told me to clean it after that. And I did.”

“That wasn't _my_ sword. But fine. I’ll accept that. You remember that, huh?” 

Ryuzo remembered it, too. Very clearly. Jin's first time sucking a cock. His stomach clenched at the thought. Jin had been so sweetly inexperienced back then but so eager to please at the same time.

“I’ll never forget that. You...” Jin faltered and Ryuzo wondered what that was about, the outrage at him having killed that guy back then still or…

“Remember what I told you back then?" Ryuzo asked. "That if you let any other man but me fuck you, I’ll kill him?" That had been foolish of him, he thought now, though it had seemed to somehow make sense to him back then, even if he himself had been sleeping with other people but Jin, specifically when he'd gotten upset with him. Except what had been there to be getting truly upset about. He had been still so young back then though, and Jin had been… a bit too much for him to handle, he supposed. Whatever Ryuzo might have wanted to do to him, he had been willing to do it and he had enjoyed himself while at it. And then he had always wanted even _more_. While he’d been slipping out of Ryuzo's grasp at the same time, no matter how much Ryuzo might have liked to keep him forever after a while, until he was going to be just gone from Ryuzo's life anyway, too busy one day with his samurai matters, samurai friends and women he needed to court to spend any more time with him. "Yet Khenbish is still alive," Ryuzo continued. Because he was through with that madness. He wanted Jin, even after all those years, but Jin wasn't the only one who would have preferred for things to be _different_ this time around. Ryuzo had vowed to keep himself in check as well. 

But those ten samurai, a small voice whispered in the back of his mind, were already more men than he'd ever killed for Jin before. 

"Or at least he _was_ alive," he added, "the last time I checked. But _you_ really did kill every man who…"

"Not on purpose," Jin said right away.

“No? You knew that some of the Straw Hats were my friends. It wasn’t a far stretch to assume that one of them might have been more than that."

"You had a lover in the Straw Hats?" Jin didn’t sound convinced at all. "The kind you actually cared about?" He sounded so suspicious that it wasn’t even funny, as if he thought that Ryuzo was somehow completely incapable of forming any attachment to anyone he slept with and that he was the only case of that having ever happened.

"And what if I did?”

'He was still a traitor', Ryuzo could almost hear it spoken in Jin’s voice before Jin even opened his mouth to say anything, 'and he deserved to die.'

"Was that why you… didn't want me around back then?" Jin asked instead.

Well, that was unexpected, Ryuzo thought. And also totally not the reason why he hadn’t wanted Jin around.

"In the Straw Hats camp?” he asked. “No. Why would it be about that? If I let you be around, you would have taken my men away from me. That was why. There would have been nothing I could have done to stop that, once you became the Ghost. _I_ couldn’t find food for them, but you would have found it and then they would have seen you fight and if you only wanted that, they would have become your army. But I didn't want that to happen to them. For them to be commanded by the nephew of the jito and then forced to work for Lord Shimura. Because you can imagine what he would have done with them. And it seemed then that that was what was going to happen. Even the Mongols didn't seem like such a bad alternative. Though if I had known then that you were actually capable of saying 'no' to Lord Shimura's orders, I might have been acting differently. But even you yourself didn't know that yet. It _was_ part of the reason how I managed to keep my hands off you when you showed up after three years and got that ‘please fuck me’ look on your face once we were alone, though. Because I was so not ready for that otherwise. I thought you’d grow out of that, but there you were."

“I do not make a face like that.”

“You do. At least in front of me. Though you probably show it to other men as well, the right kind of men. They just don’t take you up on that offer because they’re scared of you. Or they used to be scared of your uncle.”

“I _don’t_. And the next time you’ll think you'll see it, tell me.”

"Sure." Ryuzo shrugged. "But let's start preparing now, Lord Sakai." 

He turned away from Jin and thought how he still needed to set up some targets to even have anything to shoot at.

Except Jin wasn't leaving.

"He didn't fuck me," he spoke up instead. "Khenbish. I fucked him. Only you ever…"

"You telling me that doesn't help me focus." Ryuzo took a deep breath.

‘Only you ever…’, he repeated in his thoughts. Jin could always think of a way to unsettle him like that, couldn’t he? 

Ryuzo moved to put the bow away against the wall of the building because the way things were going, it didn’t seem like he was going to be shooting any arrows anytime soon. Then he walked up to Jin.

"You knew anyway," Jin said, looking up at him once he got all close to him. "Or he _would_ be dead."

"You sound as if you’d like that.” Ryuzo put his hand on the armor on Jin’s shoulder and forced himself not to flinch at the contact with the cold metal. “But that's for you to wonder." He reached out his other hand to brush his knuckles over the scar on Jin's cheek. "Not mine, huh?" 

Jin didn’t argue with him over this this time around, which was promising. And he reached for Ryuzo’s hand but instead of moving it away, like Ryuzo might have expected, he put his own over it and kept it there. 

"You should focus, too, Lord Sakai,” Ryuzo said. “And maybe you also shouldn't have drunk all that sake on your own."

Definitely, he thought, when Jin leaned into his touch. That was precisely what he had meant. And Jin had wanted to be told, hadn’t he?

Ryuzo moved his hand to brush his thumb against Jin's lower lip, which trembled under his touch. 

“There,” he said. “Seriously? Already? You want it now."

Jin stayed silent and still.

"You’d let me fuck you now if I chose to," Ryuzo continued. "On that fur-lined mino of yours, by the hearth. I'd take you from behind. What do you say?”

Jin wasn’t saying anything but neither was he discouraging him, which was enough of a reason to keep going.

“Except your arm is hurt.” Ryuzo decided to think it through in more detail. Because why not. “Your back is hurt, too. So, what would I do with you? You'd have to be on top, in my lap. Still sounds good, right? And I always liked you fucking yourself on my cock. I’d pin your hands down so you couldn’t touch yourself, so you’d just get some friction from brushing against my stomach and then we’d wait, until you would come just from having me move inside you, however long it might take. And maybe you’d wear yourself out enough to finally go to sleep. You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

Jin's breath hitched in his throat and Ryuzo felt terribly hot inside at the sound, despite how cold it was.

"Because you'd like to be that boy in my arms again, right?" he asked. "Only interested in his own pleasure and making the man he likes feel good. To forget all those things you have to deal with now otherwise. But sadly, we don't have time for that, Lord Sakai.” He took his hand away from Jin's face, despite Jin’s attempt to grab it and keep it there. “And you know it’s harder on me than on you, too, don't you? I jerked you off this morning. And I realize it wasn't much, but at least it was _something_. On the other hand, all you do all day to me is…" He took a step back and away from Jin. "Just go. If we both live through tonight…"

“We won’t be alone then," Jin spoke up.

“ _I_ will be. There’s only so much I can take.”

"I don't want you to."

"What? Go away to masturbate? I'm afraid you do not get a say."

“I don’t?” 

Why was he asking that, Ryuzo wondered. And then he watched Jin stick the swords he’d taken from him in his obi next to his own and drop down to his knees. Which was not something Ryuzo would have necessarily expected to happen but in the end who was he to complain.

"What are you doing?" he asked, even though he had a pretty good idea, further confirmed when Jin started fumbling with the fastenings of his hakama. The fleeting touches as he was doing that were enough to make Ryuzo hard at this point.

"Returning the favor," Jin said.

Which one, Ryuzo wondered, jerking him off or kneeling in front of him? Well, he thought, at least Jin hadn't let the second one get to his head.

Ryuzo still wasn't sure why this was happening when Jin freed his cock to the frigid air. It was unbearably cold until he took it into his mouth. And he must have been cold as well, kneeling on the snow-covered ground. Ryuzo tangled his hand in his hair. It felt good to know that Jin wanted him so much, too.

The comfort of the warmth of his mouth was quickly replaced for Ryuzo by the discomfort of having to stay upright though, when he felt himself going weak at the knees the moment the head of his cock hit the back of Jin's throat. He welcomed it, on second thought, because if he _was_ somewhere warm and comfortable, he might have come right away from that and he sure as hell wouldn't have liked that.

Let Jin earn it, he thought, if he wanted it. He ran his hand through Jin's hair, returning the favor as well, he supposed, but didn't put any pressure there. At least not yet. Jin was doing good enough on his own, his throat easing some more around the head of Ryuzo's cock without any choking sounds at all before he started to move his head. He might have gotten a little practice not that long time ago, Ryuzo thought, because he didn't remember him being this good when they had been doing this for the last time, though they had also been very drunk back then and that had been the only reason why it had even been happening. But the thought of Jin having possibly done this to Khenbish didn’t bother Ryuzo very much. Not like Jin was going to see that guy ever again.

It was starting to feel really good and while Ryuzo had been looking down at Jin’s head moving between his legs so far, he had to stop now. He chose to stare straight ahead at the setting sun instead, while it was disappearing behind the horizon. It would have been poetic to finish right when it was gone, he thought. That made him buckle into Jin’s mouth and Jin’s uninjured hand moved to grip his hip to stop it. And that grip was so tight that Ryuzo was pretty sure that there was going to be a bruise left there, but he also didn't really mind as long as his cock was enveloped by that tight heat. He was growing more frantic though and the sun was nearly gone and he wanted more than Jin was giving him. His hand tightened in Jin's hair and that was enough for Jin to take him deeper and faster until Ryuzo came into his throat, muttering a string of expletives that didn't make any sense even to him.

He withdrew from Jin’s mouth once Jin had swallowed everything but kept his hand on Jin's head. He only took it away reluctantly, because he needed it to start getting his clothes back in order.

"That was fun, Lord Sakai," he said as soon as he calmed down a little. 

Jin got back to his feet and started shivering from the cold. Ryuzo wanted to hold him to warm him up, but it was probably a better idea for him to just go sit by a fire.

"Good.” Jin got a hold of himself and stopped shivering. His hair was all messed up still though, half out of the topknot. “Because I'm not doing this again as long as you won't do it to me first. You understand?"

"Yes." Ryuzo bit back the 'my lord' he wanted to add.

Jin licked his lips.

“And if you happen not to be sufficiently interested and it takes you too long," he said. "I will find another man to do this to and it won’t matter to me if you’ll feel like killing him later. There are plenty of mainland samurai around now, whom I don't need here anyway. Some _are_ nice to look at though, in those beautiful armors. And I bet some of them wouldn’t mind spilling their seed into the throat of a willing Tsushima ronin. Yours or not.”

Ryuzo smiled.

“You think I'd be so upset," he said, "but I may decide I’d like to see that."

Though he knew what Jin's problem was. Those several times that Jin had sucked him off after they had no longer been together, when they had drunk way too much sake. And he hoped it wasn't like that now, too. Because back then Jin had always looked troubled the next day, though it hadn't been as if Ryuzo had been forcing him to do that. He had had only himself to blame after the fact.

The sun had already set and it was getting dark now. Not much time left for shooting practice, Ryuzo thought, but Jin was still standing there, looking at him.

He appeared to be somewhat less tense, at least for now.

“I think you feel a bit better,” Ryuzo observed. "I told you I'd cheer you up."

Jin looked at him incredulously but Ryuzo had a feeling that he was right. And hopefully Jin was not going to regret it later, either.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," he said, before turning on his heel and going away.

Ryuzo finally got down to shooting that Japanese bow. For as long as it was light enough for him to have any chance of finding the arrows that he'd shot ever again. He wasn't sure how much that kind of practice helped him but it had probably been beneficial as well to relieve that tension between them.

He went to join Jin inside the house with the hearth once he was done.

Jin’s hair was back in order and by that time, he was apparently done with all the swords but his own tanto, which he was just drying with rice paper, his oiling supplies placed on the floor around him.

Ryuzo didn’t have fond memories of that thing. And upon seeing it unsheathed and in Jin's hands, he stopped in the doorway instead of coming any closer.

Jin looked up at him and then back down to continue what he'd been doing.

"You're like those men you were talking about earlier now?” he spoke up. “Scared of me?"

"You cut me open with that thing. What would you expect?" 

"Aren’t you a warrior? If you were the one to win that fight, you would have done the same to me. Except _I_ left you in one piece. And you would have cut off my head and taken it to the Khan. No surviving _that_ for me."

Ryuzo was very taken aback by that idea and he wasn’t so sure if he had even been seriously considering it at that point in time. He had wanted the bounty on Jin’s head but that had been back when he had had his men. After that...

"You really think that?” he asked. “That I would have done something like this at that point? The Khan had told me to, sure. But my men were dead anyway. I couldn't do anything for them anymore. And the Khan couldn't have given me anything better than you. If you had forced us into a fight to the death and I would have won somehow and killed you, you can imagine what I would have done after you had been gone.”

Jin looked up at him again. He didn't look _convinced_.

"I don't believe you,” he said. “But I like the idea. Better than you cutting off my head."

He was done then and sheathed his tanto. He started collecting his oiling supplies next.

"There's something I'd like to show you, Jin," Ryuzo said and walked up to him then to sit by his side.

Jin was busy packing up his things though and wasn't looking at him or showing any interest.

“You know what this is?” Ryuzo took out a small container out of the folds of his clothing, unscrewed it and showed its contents to Jin.

Jin did take a look but he didn’t seem particularly thrilled.

“I can imagine,” he said with a sigh. "Why show me that now?"

“Seaweed extract. It makes it feel better.”

“Is that what seeing me oil swords makes you think about?"

"I didn't get it for us, but since I already have it..." Ryuzo shrugged.

"You couldn't be bothered to get proper oil for your swords. But this... Besides, it was fine with what we used back then, too. Felt good enough to me.”

“I’m not saying it didn’t. But I want to try this with you as well. Both ways,” Ryuzo added before Jin could become upset. He closed the container and hid it.

Jin grew silent, which Ryuzo supposed was not a good sign. Maybe he could have thought of more romantic ways to ask to stay by his side, but he doubted Jin needed that at this point.

“You’re going to say anything?” he asked.

Jin stayed silent for another moment.

“Maybe I’d _like to_ ,” he said in the end, “but there are other people I have to think about. People who trust me. And you may be wanting more out of this than what I’m going to be able or willing to give you.”

“Well, it was like that the previous time, too. Just the other way around. And you still got what you wanted.”

“I don’t get what you mean.”

Of course, Ryuzo thought.

“Never mind, Jin," he said. "I'm just thinking aloud.”

Jin looked at him but when Ryuzo wasn’t saying anything more, he turned away, straightened up and closed his eyes, apparently intending to meditate. 

A samurai heading into battle, Ryuzo thought. Jin could call himself a ronin all he wanted, but that wasn’t going to make him one.

Instead of meditating himself, Ryuzo found himself thinking back to a certain night at Castle Shimura. To the first time they had fucked for real. When Jin had been the one who had wanted more than Ryuzo might have been willing to give him. And to how he had gotten it in the end. Jin might have remembered it differently, maybe even with Ryuzo as the one who had somehow initiated it.

But it was Jin who had invited him to come to his room at Castle Shimura at night, which was a first. They had never needed a room or anywhere close to a whole night for what they had been doing together up to that point. After several times, they had gotten pretty efficient at jerking each other off fairly quickly and quietly in the dark corners of the castle or, preferably, its vast gardens, though it had been fall and it hadn’t been getting any warmer. The whole thing had been satisfactory enough for Ryuzo like that and he had felt no need for anything more. And conveniently, it had also not felt serious enough for him to stop sleeping with women whenever an opportunity had presented itself. He had laughed it off when Jin had complained to him about it, too. And he had really thought that Jin had been joking back then. Though on second thought, he probably hadn’t been.

That invitation seemed to be a promise of something more but Ryuzo wasn’t convinced if he even wanted it. But at least a part of him was far too intrigued for him to just ignore it either. Besides, Jin would have gotten offended if he hadn’t shown up, and he wouldn’t have wanted that, if only because they were such good friends.

He left his own sleeping quarters in the middle of the night, which was something he was doing regularly anyway, and proceeded to sneak into Jin’s room, which was in a whole different part of the castle. When he entered it, as quietly as he could, Jin was sitting in the middle of it in the darkness next to an unrolled futon, only wearing a yukata.

“Why did you tell me to come here?” Ryuzo whispered to him, sitting down right next to him so they could talk as quietly as possible. He still felt ready to leave if he didn't like what Jin was going to say.

It was very dark, the only source of light in the room being the window and a faraway lamp on the corridor barely visible through the shoji door and Ryuzo could only see anything at all because he’d already crossed the castle in the near darkness and his eyes were as used to it as they were going to get.

“I want you to spend the night with me,” Jin said, “like you do with those girls you sleep with.”

“Here?” Ryuzo asked. He obviously slept with those girls in the castle as well, but it was one thing to be caught with a servant girl and a whole other thing when it would have been the jito’s nephew.

“It’s not like anyone goes into my room at night. If we're quiet...”

“Jin…” Ryuzo had been afraid that this was going to happen sooner or later. Though he had hoped that Jin was going to be able to stop himself from wanting too much out of this thing they had. It should have been on him after all. It was he who was going to have to get married, maybe even sometime soon, depending on what his uncle was planning for him. Ryuzo also didn’t know if Jin even understood how things worked between two men and what he was asking for. And he would have certainly not been thrilled back then himself to have another man’s cock in that place where it was supposed to go.

“I have oil,” Jin said. “And I know how it works. I already tried. With my fingers.” 

“We don’t have to do that, Jin. Not ever.”

“Except if we won’t, it’d never be enough for you. To just be with me. And forget everyone else.” This was the first time Jin was even _telling_ him that was what he wanted.

“Listen, Jin...” Ryuzo reached for Jin’s hand and took it in his. All the callouses and scars on it were perfectly familiar to him at that point and he really didn’t want to ruin this thing they had so badly that he would have never gotten to hold it again. “We’re both men. We won’t be together forever. I like you a lot, but it’s better to just fool around. And leave it at that. And _you_ should try it with a girl.”

“I don’t want to.”

That was the moment when he should have left, Ryuzo thought. But he couldn’t make himself do it. 

It was Jin who pushed him down to the futon and undressed him enough to get a hold of his cock and then stroke it to hardness with practiced motions, stopping just before it started to feel really good. And it was Jin who oiled his own hand and, looking Ryuzo in the eye, reached it behind him to impale himself on his own fingers, still wearing the yukata with nothing underneath, apparently. His breathing grew ragged as he did something to himself there, moving up and down on his fingers a little bit, and it was at that point that Ryuzo realized that he was very much _not_ leaving and that it was happening for real because he felt that if he had left, he would have been imagining the rest of that night to the end of his life. He reached for the oil that Jin had put by their side and smeared it on his fingers as well and moved his hand to that place where Jin was attempting to stretch himself. He pushed his finger in there alongside Jin’s, barely fitting it there. The tightness was surprising but not unwelcome. Jin's cock sprang up, untouched, in the opening of his yukata, apparently at the feeling of someone else touching him there.

"Do it for me," Jin whispered to Ryuzo. "There is a place, if you curl your fingers a bit, where…" He took his fingers away and Ryuzo fit in two of his own, searching for that place that Jin was talking about. Jin sighed and trembled when he found it and Ryuzo wanted to do this to him again. “It feels better when you do it,” Jin observed. “But don't…” he protested when Ryuzo kept on touching him there. "I'll come. Stop."

Ryuzo stopped because he too wanted Jin to come with him inside him and he wanted to be inside him already at that point but fitting in a third finger proved to be more of a challenge than he would have expected and by the time Jin got used to it, most of Ryuzo's rational thoughts about what they should have been and shouldn’t have been doing were just gone. Jin finally deemed himself ready enough, got off Ryuzo's fingers, took a hold of Ryuzo's cock and moved to try and impale himself on it. As it started entering him, Ryuzo could tell that he was in pain, no matter how tough he was trying to act. He reached up to rub his sides soothingly, thinking how taking a girl’s virginity wasn’t painless for her either, and how this was essentially the same thing. He pulled Jin down for a kiss and stayed perfectly still as Jin was lowering himself on him, much too slowly for comfort, until he finally took all of him and then grew used enough to it to start moving a bit with his hands tangled in the clothes on Ryuzo’s chest. But then it was too good and too tight and Ryuzo came almost right away with a startled gasp, spilling inside Jin.

“I like how that feels,” Jin whispered into his ear, “when it’s throbbing inside me like that.”

That information went straight to Ryuzo’s softening cock. And he could feel that he was going to be hard again very soon, if he wanted to. He pulled out and rolled them over, pressing Jin down to the futon. Jin liked to be held down, if they got a chance to lie down, and he relaxed under him now as well, letting him settle between his legs. Ryuzo started kissing his throat to pass the time until he could become hard again. Jin’s cock was straining desperately against his stomach, moist with precum, but Ryuzo made an effort not to touch it. He reached between Jin’s legs, omitting it carefully, and circled his fingers around Jin’s entrance instead. His sperm was spilling out of it and he pushed some of it back inside, his fingers catching on the rim. Jin whimpered at the sensation and bit his own hand immediately to stifle the sound. When Ryuzo moved to pull it out of his mouth and take a look at it, he found out that he had bitten it hard enough to draw blood. He leaned down to lick it off Jin's skin and the metallic taste on his tongue was just what he needed to get ready to go again.

“Find something better to bite on," he said into Jin's ear, "because I’m going to fuck you properly in a minute.”

Jin nodded, apparently a bit dazed with what was happening, and Ryuzo slathered some of the oil on his cock and stretched him a bit more with three oiled fingers before pushing himself back inside him. It was much easier to enter him now and he was nowhere near as tense as before, making it possible to move almost right away. Ryuzo held back, up to a point, since he was the one in control now, but then Jin's legs closed around his hips and he figured that was no longer necessary. Jin had settled on biting on a bunched up sleeve of his yukata to stifle his moans as Ryuzo thrusted inside him, angling for that place he'd found earlier. It felt really good, maybe even better than it did with other people, Ryuzo thought, maybe just because he didn’t care about anyone else the way he cared about Jin. And maybe he could forget everyone else. He wrapped a hand around Jin's cock and squeezed it lightly and Jin came from that right away, tensing up and spilling between them, his insides clenching around Ryuzo’s cock.

"You don't have to stop," he said once he could speak, because Ryuzo had stilled, unsure if he should keep on moving after that.

And it was just what Ryuzo wanted to hear. Jin squeezed his eyes shut when he started to move again. And as Ryuzo fucked him, after a while, he started biting on that sleeve again, even though he wasn't hard yet, just from having someone moving inside him. That was... interesting, Ryuzo thought, and his mind started supplying him with images of all the other ways he could take Jin, if he _liked_ it so much, until he came for the second time inside him, spilling even more seed there. 

'What are we even doing?' Ryuzo thought to himself, trying to catch his breath, because, frankly, he had never been as impressed with any girl before as he was with Jin now. He slipped out of him and leaned down to kiss him and Jin kissed him back eagerly, closing his arms around him, and they were kissing until Ryuzo collapsed on top of him, unable to support himself anymore. Jin didn’t seem to mind, even though it was becoming very sticky between them in several places and they really needed to clean up soon.

This was going to happen again, Ryuzo thought, burying his nose into the side of Jin's neck to breathe in his scent. For a moment longer. Before he had to leave.

There was no way back to how things used to be between them. And it was somewhat scary. But maybe they could make it, somehow, together.

  



	6. Sago Mill 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I discussed Kazumasa's death with some people and now I know that not everyone noticed that - the cutscene of Kazumasa's death takes place under the red maple tree in Sago Mill. Jin’s vantage point for it is the entrance of that building where there is a hook and a body drowned in a vat of dye and the buildings on that and the other side of the river can be seen behind Kazumasa. The game doesn't state out right that's where he died, though (as far as I know). And since that cutscene is just something in Jin’s head, I guess it’s possible that he died elsewhere and Jin just imagines it happening there for whatever reason. But for the purposes of this fic, I take that cutscene at face value.

Meditating proved to be a challenge with Ryuzo staring at him the whole time, something Jin could feel even with his eyes closed, until his skin was crawling with the sensation of being observed so badly that he could barely keep still.

His arm had been throbbing with pain constantly under the armor and he was trying to get a hold of that pain and put it away somewhere in his mind for the time being so it wouldn’t have bothered him during the upcoming fight, though the other thing that worried him was how much use he was going to even be able to make of that arm if he needed it, but Ryuzo apparently wasn’t having any of that, because he finally interrupted him entirely to cup his face in his hands and start kissing him, the wrappings on his sword hand rubbing against Jin’s cheek. He might have as well done that, Jin thought, considering he couldn't concentrate anyway with Ryuzo staring at him like that.

Kissing was distracting him from the pain as well, though it wasn’t going to be effective long term. But he'd brought it upon himself by sucking Ryuzo off earlier, he supposed. He let his hand sneak under the clothes on Ryuzo’s chest and ran it over the muscles there, dragging it down to avoid touching the scar. Sooner or later, he thought, they were going to end up naked and in each other's arms. Ryuzo had been right earlier, too. If he had just chosen to do that, they would have fucked already, everything else and his wounds be damned. And not with him on top. But he was sure that he would have enjoyed himself either way, however terrible it would have been considering who it would have been with. It was going to happen either way, as long as Ryuzo was around at all. In fact, enough had _already_ happened.

And he was supposed to be on his way back to Yuna.

Yuna, who had told him he'd done well when he had talked to her right after the fight with Ryuzo at Castle Shimura. Of course, she hadn’t been _wrong_. Ryuzo had deserved to die for what he’d done, and not only in Jin's eyes. If Jin had decided not to kill him, he would have been executed anyway once caught by Lord Shimura’s forces. He had been incredibly lucky to both survive and escape from the castle. And to still be alive after showing himself to Jin again. But if Yuna found out about him still being around…

Jin had known right away that he had to kill Ryuzo before he reached Jogaku, if only because Ryuzo wasn’t powerless either and if forced to fight for his life, he might have been the one to win several fights against people dear to Jin. And the resulting bloodshed would have been Jin's fault alone. After all, he had had so many chances already to finish what he’d started at Castle Shimura and to do it _properly_ this time around. He was hopefully still going to have as many, except this time around he already knew what killing Ryuzo was going to do to him. And that knowledge was making him start considering the possibility that maybe Ryuzo could be convinced to go somewhere else and hide from Jin's allies, but still be there for him, whenever he would have been able to go spend time with him. But that reeked to Jin of his thoughts when he had been much younger, when he had been wondering how to keep Ryuzo by his side even while he had been on his way to becoming the jito and the head of yet another samurai clan. It had always been a given anyway that he had had to get married and have sons but he had still wanted to find a way to fit Ryuzo into that future life somehow. Ryuzo had always hated any talk of these kinds of arrangements, though. Jin could understand why. And Ryuzo's unwillingness to compromise over something like this might have been precisely the reason why Jin had always found him so alluring. Ryuzo probably wasn't going to agree to anything like that now either, however less reasonable that was going to be on his part. Because this time around the problem wasn’t necessarily that he was a man or a commoner and it would have been just a matter of having a certain kind of courage to come out and say that that was what he wanted. It was about what Ryuzo himself had done. But Jin expected that Ryuzo was not going to be reasonable about that and that he’d end up forcing his hand again by insisting that he'd go right where he shouldn’t go. And after he was going to be gone, Jin was going to be even more devastated than before, having let him get this close now. Even if it had only been two days.

"What's wrong, Jin?" Ryuzo asked him.

He must have noticed that Jin had stopped kissing him back a while ago, too lost in thought. Contemplating killing him, actually.

'I'm so preoccupied with other things', Jin thought, 'that I'm not really thinking of the fight, or of my father', which might have been what Ryuzo suspected him of doing. Though he knew he should probably try to concentrate now.

"I want to set off already," he said. “We won’t get any more ready than this."

“Fine. Don't think too much."

Ryuzo might have meant him overthinking his failure to save his father again, Jin assumed, but that hadn't been so debilitating for him for some time now actually, compared to the previous time when he and Ryuzo had gone to that place where his father had died. Maybe it was just because he'd suffered further losses since then and had also realized more acutely than before that not everyone could be saved anyway, regardless of how hard one tried, and that it hadn't been just a matter of him not having enough courage back then to move and do something. That if he had been brave back then, he would have also ended up dead for real. He'd had to deal with Taka's death since. With Ryuzo's own as well, back when he had thought he’d been dead, which he hadn't managed to prevent either. And if he had just been more persuasive in whatever way or had tried that much harder to feed the Straw Hats… But there had been no point in dwelling on these what-ifs anyway. He had channeled that energy into killing the Khan instead and it had helped him somewhat to have been the one to personally sink his blade into that man in the end. His father had likewise been avenged by Lord Shimura years ago and this current situation really had nothing to do with his death. Someone had just heard something and was trying to make it about it.

Jin had been in Sago Mill already during the Mongol invasion, though. He'd walked right around the place where his father had died, under the red maple tree, without thinking about it too hard, when he had had to solve the dark mystery of that place back then. He had been clad in the Ghost armor, fighting a war as an adult man who had forged his own path and he'd needed to be above the concerns of young Lord Sakai, whatever that place had been reminding him of. There had just been no other choice.

Well, he had ended up throwing everyone out of Sago Mill in the end and he had made enough of an impression that he'd heard from Norio months later that it had still been pretty much abandoned, but that hadn't been about his father, even though Jin had to admit that he hadn't been impressed by the place where his father had died getting further sullied with all the crimes committed there during the Mongol invasion. Murders. Torture. Rapes. Because why else would the men of Sago Mill have packed their women into wooden boxes naked to carry them out of the town and give them to the Mongols.

He had chosen not to dwell on this happening all around him during the war, because it hadn't been his intention to lose his mind entirely, but it was still something he found especially abhorrent about Ryuzo's treason and his tries to convince _him_ to join the Mongol side as well. And it was something he feared. That even if he somehow found a way to keep Ryuzo alive and part of his life, he was going to find out one day that Ryuzo had taken women like that as well while on the Mongol side, maybe not by force, but because they had been there and they had had no other choice. He would have killed Ryuzo for that. But there was also the possibility that it could have happened and he was just never going to learn about it. And he felt sick at the thought.

"Let's go," he said, forcing himself not to think about that now. Things could wait, he thought, all kinds of things, even something like this.

They collected their things and left the burned down village on their horses.

It was another bright night outside and the sky continued to be clear. They started travelling along the river which was going to guide them all the way to Sago Mill.

'Why there', Jin wondered, just like he had wondered all those times before while thinking about his father's death. Why take a girl from Omi Village all that way to the north, risk crossing into Kamiagata and going deep into Kikuchi territory to lure and ambush Lord Sakai there? And why hadn't the Kikuchi samurai been there as well? Fort Kikuchi and their estate at the time was just to the side from where he and Ryuzo were now after all. Why hadn’t his father sent someone to get help from them? Why hadn’t Lord Shimura been there for that matter? Though admittedly, he had been the jito and had probably been busy with other things somewhere else.

Jin had heard all about his father just being reckless, going there with too few men and his and his brother-in-law's only heir in tow, securing no help from the other clans just because he had thought he hadn't needed it.

He had also heard all the conspiracy theories. And he hated himself for being so ignorant back then as well and not retaining any of the facts that might have helped him understand later. And for being so traumatized even after such a long time that he had never gotten to talk with his uncle about that incident in detail as an adult.

"So, what are we up against?” Ryuzo asked, interrupting Jin's thoughts. “Since you couldn’t have been much more vague last night.”

“Have you heard about Umugi Cove?”

“That it was taken over by… Shit.” Ryuzo seemed to have an idea of what had happened there, which, Jin supposed, was convenient.

“What have you heard?”

“Just some crazy stories about two samurai, a woman with a naginata and some ronin taking out Lady Sanjo’s forces and whoever else was up for fighting to protect it, on their own, while severely outnumbered."

“And?”

“And what?”

“I was there as well. I duelled one of those samurai. And I killed him.”

“Well, I haven’t heard about _that_. Was it an easy fight?"

Jin considered that. It had been hellish, he thought, and it had left him with a nasty scar on his stomach, but it had been mostly because he had gone into it already injured.

“Could have been easier,” he said.

“It’s them? They came to Tsushima for you?"

"It's the other samurai on his own, the one I haven't killed, as far as I’ve seen in that bandits’ camp. Though there might be others with him now. And if there _are_ too many of them there, we'd have to retreat. Go and get more people on our side as well. But this will take time and I don't know how they may be treating their hostage."

"If a samurai has her, shouldn’t he be treating her well? Or _not taking_ hostages in the first place, I suppose? Isn’t that the idea? Or do the mainland samurai have different customs around that?"

"Forget him being a samurai. He attacked me from the back in Umugi Cove." From _above_ , to be more precise. “And he ran away from a fight with me in that bandits' camp.”

“I guess, Umugi Cove wouldn't have been a place for regular samurai to rule anyway. All the pirates would have moved elsewhere then. It was him who cut your arm? What does he want? Your head? Revenge for that other one?”

“Something like that. I want to kill him, too." For what they’d done to Yuna, Jin thought. And for disturbing Omi Village's peace like that. Attempting to hit him where it hurt, repeatedly.

"I'll keep that in mind," Ryuzo said. He didn’t seem to be aware of what the _problem_ with that guy was.

"Ryuzo, he's like _me_."

“What do you mean?”

“He’ll attack from whichever side. By whatever means. Watch your back. Watch the roofs.”

Ryuzo grew quiet for a moment, maybe because he was starting to understand that it might not have been so easy and that the possibility of one or both of them not coming out of this alive was not insignificant.

"Any ideas, Jin?" he asked in the end.

“I don’t think that he’s necessarily a better swordsman than you. Just somewhat unpredictable. That's how he injured me. But he does make errors. When I fought him, I was getting a feel for him already. I would have killed him if we had continued. That's why he ran away when he had the chance. He probably won't be willing to fight me head on again." Hopefully, Jin thought, considering the state of his arm. "And now, he may be planning something else. But if you’re able to make him fight you, even for a moment, you won’t lose right away, and that may keep him distracted long enough for me to...”

"Fine. But all that, abducting that woman from Omi Village, making you come all the way here, just to try to take your head?"

“I don’t understand it either,” Jin said. Just like he hadn't understood the same thing having happened to his father in the past. “Though at first, they did ask me to join them and go to the mainland with them. But I think they didn't like my answer."

"And why was it a ‘no’? You would have been gone from here, not disturbing _the peace_ anymore."

There was something to that, Jin thought, considering that they had also promised him amnesty for his supporters in Umugi Cove, which theoretically could have made it possible for him to just order everyone to go there, leaving the rest of the island for the mainland samurai to rule without any conflicts with the Ghost's supporters, provided that everyone would have listened to him. But that hadn’t been sitting right with him, even disregarding the fact that these mainlanders had been planning to keep Yuna prisoner to control him. He didn't trust them to keep their end of the bargain for one, not when they had approached him in such a way. And he didn't want to live like that, which was something they must have been expecting anyway, since they had assumed right away that he wouldn’t have gone with them willingly. Serving someone under such circumstances, not being a samurai anymore, he could have been ordered to do anything. And for all the atrocities he'd committed during the war, he'd only chosen to do that to the Mongols, traitors and bandits, making his own decisions every single time. Being forced to do whatever to whomever would have been a whole different thing.

But it had been someone’s idea to make him submit like that and him refusing that offer might have still had various consequences down the line other than what was happening now. And he knew where the unwillingness to be ruled by the powers that be could lead. He’d spent his whole childhood in the shadow of a civil war. And regardless of any differences in circumstances, he didn’t want something like the Yarikawa Rebellion happening again, because of him. But he was aware that exactly that could happen, even if every action he'd taken so far had been justified in the moment. He had had to refuse that offer and retaliate because there was only so much he could take and he wouldn’t have wanted Yuna to be involved for sure. The samurai at Fort Kaminodake, too. He had needed to leave that fort on the Kamiagata side and make sure Takeshi’s men, the remaining ones, could leave as well and go where they wanted, not be refugees in the south after what they had done for him.

Otherwise he still refrained from killing samurai, other than in duels. But it was obvious that other situations in which he would be forced to act were coming. And at that point he wasn’t sure anymore if he was helping anyone in the long term or just making things worse, maybe even by merely existing. He still felt on the brink of ending it all when he had such thoughts. He could go to Jogaku and explain it to everyone before, say his goodbyes, but in the end, hadn’t he done _enough_ already anyway?

“Regardless of why, I didn't agree,” he said, answering Ryuzo’s question. "I doubt this offer still stands at this point. From what I've heard, that other samurai I killed was this one’s father.”

Though that younger samurai had given Jin his swords back himself then and had told him to do that. But now he was out for revenge anyway, maybe just to keep up appearances.

The water in the river they had been following wasn’t frozen and while during the day it had that turquoise shade that rivers in the mountains sometimes had, in the dark its color was deep dark blue. It actually reminded Jin of the color of the clan armor of that samurai. And of the dyes that used to be made in Sago Mill before the war. The Kikuchi samurai, back when there had been any, had been wearing green armors, but those blue dyes had been often used to dye their kimonos, including those of the Kikuchi women.

“Jin,” Ryuzo spoke up, “if those mainlanders capture me, try to kill me. In case they find out who I am. I'm not interested in sitting in a cage only to be executed for treason. And I’m not you. It’s not likely I would have been able to escape."

Jin accepted that, but didn’t say anything back.

They were already close to Sago Mill but instead of going there directly, Jin made a detour to the farmstead where the women from Sago Mill whom he’d rescued from the Mongols had been staying. He was hoping to maybe learn something useful from them. It was quiet and peaceful there when they arrived. Jin got off his horse and headed to one of the houses that had some lights visible inside.

Ryuzo followed him.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“Sago Mill was not untouched by the war. It’s where some of the survivors live now.”

“They owe you something?”

“I just want to find out if they have seen anything unusual lately. And we’ll leave the horses here.”

Having reached the house, Jin knocked on the door.

“I am Lord Sakai,” he called out. “I want to ask you something.”

The door opened a moment later and a woman invited them inside to sit by the hearth with her, not inquiring about who Ryuzo was at all. Several more women came out from deeper inside the house.

Ryuzo seemed puzzled, probably by the absence of men, but he didn’t say anything.

“I hope things are fine,” Jin said, though he was unsure about this place’s food situation. Hopefully, the women had been able to get something from Cedar Temple or had found some food elsewhere.

“We’re waiting for the spring, Lord Sakai,” the woman said. “To be able to farm. It hasn't been easy, but we’ve survived up till now. The monks from Cedar Temple have promised to supply us with seeds.”

Good, Jin thought, hoping the mainland samurai weren’t going to disturb the peace of this place before these women could grow anything and reap the fruits of their labor. Though that might have been too much to hope for.

“Has anyone shown up lately in Sago Mill?” he asked. “Anything suspicious you’ve seen?”

“What’s happening, Lord Sakai?” The woman sounded immediately alarmed. And Jin wasn’t surprised, after what had already happened to them during the war.

“I’ve learned of a woman that has been abducted by bandits and taken to Sago Mill,” he said. “She’s not from around here, though. They’ve brought her here all the way from Toyotama.”

“I've heard of something like this happening before…” , one of the other women started to say but then she must have realized what the rest of that story was because she hesitated to tell any more of it, “...I’m sorry, Lord Sakai,” was all she said in the end.

“It’s been years ago.” Jin hadn’t come here to discuss his father’s death anyway. What he was interested in was what was happening now. “Have you noticed anything? Anyone? Maybe passing through here?”

“A samurai,” another woman spoke up. When Jin looked at her, he realized she was more of a girl than a grown up woman. And she appeared to be emaciated, unlike the others, her probably still growing body not getting enough food here. Jin decided to leave all the food that he and Ryuzo had with them here at the sight.

The women started talking among themselves then but it turned out that the other ones hadn’t seen anything, so they decided to let the girl talk in the end.

“I've seen a samurai in a dark blue armor,” she said. “A young man. On a beautiful white horse. He passed through here. All alone. And he smiled at me when he caught me looking at him. Then I got scared and ran away to hide.”

Maybe he had just been patrolling, Jin thought. Though that would have been ordinarily done with two people. That samurai could be here all alone for real, though that would have been both very strange and very brave on his part. The abducted woman must have been held somewhere but she may have also been guarded by someone else.

Not having learned much, Jin went outside to bring the food they had with them to give it to the women. Ryuzo seemed to be displeased about him giving it all away but Jin ignored that. Not like it was Ryuzo's to begin with.

He and Ryuzo left the farmstead on foot. Sago Mill was just a short distance away, but Jin preferred to avoid the road and go through the snow-covered forest and a field of pampas grass. Walking through the knee-high snow was going to take some time.

“Where are the men?” Ryuzo asked once they were some distance away from the farmstead. "All dead in the war? They had some kind of resistance force here?"

“I would have been glad if it was that." Jin sighed. "Though some of them did try to fight back. The other men of Sago Mill ran an operation where they gave the women from the town to the Mongols in exchange for being left in peace. Those women there were the ones I managed to save. They prefer to live there now.”

“You killed those men?”

“I didn't kill them, I told them to leave this place and never show themselves around here again. I executed the one who had come up with the plan. The rest were scared and listened.”

“Sago Mill is abandoned then?”

“It should be. Pretty much."

"Better than if it was full of people," Ryuzo muttered. "Hopefully it’ll go well.”

They were close now and they could see the buildings of Sago Mill clearly even in the near darkness. The lanterns at the entrance of the town were not lit and no other lights were visible anywhere either.

“I hope for no more surprises on your part, Lord Sakai," Ryuzo spoke up.

"Likewise."

Ryuzo actually shrugged. He was acting a bit weird, Jin thought, but maybe he was just nervous.

"I did promise to serve you," Ryuzo said. "And it’s not like I have anything better to do, the way things worked out. Or as if anyone could give me anything better than you. I love you, Jin."

Jin looked at Ryuzo but all he saw was a smile that seemed to him to be sincere. But it wasn’t the first time he had heard Ryuzo tell him that, and the circumstances of that previous time were not something he remembered fondly. That previous time had also been in Sago Mill, making it all the more suspicious, when they had come here back in the old times, while they had still been together.

He was standing under the red maple tree where his father had died then, racked with guilt and sadness, and Ryuzo approached him and asked him if he could kiss him. Jin said ‘yes’, even though it was the middle of the day, in a populous town, and the place where they were standing wasn't even particularly secluded. There was the risk that someone could see them, but Jin would have taken anything that could have distracted him in that moment. Ryuzo kissed him and took his hands in his and told him he loved him. It was the first time he had told him that. And Jin thought that he loved him, too, _so much_ , but he couldn't force himself to say that out loud. Maybe because back at Castle Shimura before they set off for Kamiagata, Ryuzo had been getting more and more unhappy with him and had been also gradually turning more cruel, ignoring him for days at a time, while spending time with other people, in various ways, and not even making any effort to hide it from Jin. But then this trip started and all that somehow ceased to be important. They had a lot of privacy and made love every night and Ryuzo was catching fish under the ice after they had been done with their duties and cooking it for them and it was great overall. But when they went back to Castle Shimura and met to spar the following morning, Ryuzo told him it was over.

Jin never understood why Ryuzo had said he loved him at all if he knew that he was going to do that. And he wondered if it could have been true at all and if Ryuzo had ever really loved him, even in a misguided way.

After that, they never slept together again, although they still kissed sometimes and he sucked Ryuzo off a few more times while drunk, not feeling so great about doing that after the fact.

‘Why tell me that now’, he thought with a sinking feeling in his stomach, noting all the similarities with their current situation.

They reached the bridge leading into Sago Mill and Jin eyed the river under it, thinking how icy cold it was going to be to swim through. He was not eager to jump into its waters at all, but it was still what he intended to do to arrive unannounced. He opened his mouth to tell Ryuzo to wait for him for now, but was distracted by a glint of a blade in the moonlight on the road in front of them. It was his wakizashi, he realized, which he hadn't gotten back in Umugi Cove. It was stuck in the mud in the middle of the road, the scabbard dropped next to it in the snow. But while he wanted it back, he knew better than to go get it.

“They figured out you’d arrive this way,” Ryuzo whispered to him.

They might have known about his connection to the farmstead, Jin thought. Or something had also been left for him on the road on the other side of the town, though he wasn’t sure what that could have been. But Yuna had lost her sword and knife in Umugi Cove, too.

“Stay here,” he said to Ryuzo. “I’ll go there first and take a look.”

“I’ll go and take a look, Jin. It’s not like they’re expecting me here. And you're wounded. Isn't that why I'm here?”

Ryuzo didn’t wait for Jin's confirmation at all. He walked out of the pampas grass and onto the road, passed by the wakizashi and crossed the bridge into the town.

That was not how Jin had planned to do this at all and he wondered what that was truly about. Still, he decided that he had no choice but to follow Ryuzo while staying hidden. He jumped into the river without hesitating anymore.

  



	7. Sago Mill 2

The bandits who had killed his father took his father’s swords and antlered helmet when they were leaving but thankfully didn't do anything awful like cutting off his father’s head.

His father's body had been left in the snow and he wanted to go to him but before he could gather his courage, some inhabitants of the town emerged from wherever they had been hiding during the fight to assess the damage and Jin didn't feel ready to face anyone so soon after what had happened and maybe he was also still afraid, so he retreated deeper into the storehouse where he had been hiding the entire time instead and curled himself up between a vat of dye and the wall, in the furthest and darkest possible corner. Someone looked into the storehouse eventually but they didn't see him in the shadows and left without even stepping inside. Soon after that, the evening came and it got gradually darker and quieter outside until it was completely silent.

Jin wondered if those people had taken his father’s body somewhere indoors for the night. They most likely had, he thought, since his father had been a samurai and they would have been blamed if his body had been further robbed or touched by animals.

It was a winter night in Kamiagata and it must have been very cold, but Jin didn't really feel that. He spent the whole night like that, sitting in the dark corner, and it reminded him of how he’d spent the nights in the forest when he’d run away from home after his mother’s death. He was so much older now, he thought, but he was still acting the same. Running away again. His father was now gone, too. And it wasn't fair at all.

He did his best not to fall asleep, somewhat aware that he could even freeze to death if he did, but he must have lost consciousness eventually because he woke up in the morning to the sound of Lord Shimura calling his name outside. Only then he got to his feet, not without difficulty, and walked out of the storehouse. He was instantly blinded by the morning sun reflected off the snow. Once he could see again, there were no longer any bodies there and all that was left was some blood on the snow.

Lord Shimura sent him back to Omi Village with some of his men immediately, with mildly frostbitten fingers and clothes stinking of dye, but otherwise unharmed. An orphan. And a coward.

That reputation followed him for a few more years among boys his age until he chanced upon a group of bandits at sixteen that he slaughtered all on his own with his father's katana. He could have gotten himself killed, he supposed.

But he also wanted their blood.

\---

Swimming through the freezing cold river separating him from Sago Mill had the unintended consequence of reminding him of his frostbitten fingers back then as he got out of the water on the other side. He climbed up the snow-covered rocks and hid behind the last one. His wounds had started to hurt worse, reminding him in turn of why he had taken Ryuzo along at all.

That might have been a mistake, he thought. They were here to save a hostage and Ryuzo had been well aware of that, but what he was doing by coming out of hiding and walking into the town out in the open like that was endangering her for no reason, even if nobody expected him here. Even if he just wanted to be helpful because Jin was wounded, though that might not even have been the reason. And for a moment Jin considered putting an arrow in him and being done with it right then and there, but he was stopped both by still being barely able to move his fingers and because _he didn't want to_.

He took a look at the bridge behind him and the road into the town in the moonlight, looking for horse tracks and footprints, but there were none but Ryuzo's. The snow might have been falling here recently though and it might have covered everything up. And just like by visiting that farmstead earlier, Jin still hadn’t learned anything useful.

Ryuzo walked into the town, a dark figure in a straw hat obscuring most of his face. Since he wasn't wearing any kind of armor and his swords were mostly hidden under his cloak and the bow that Jin had given him looked more like something a hunter might have been using, he could probably be mistaken for one, at least until someone took a close enough look at him to realize how nice his swords were. Maybe, looking like this, he was going to accomplish something here but so many things could go wrong, too, and Jin would have preferred to scout the location while staying hidden before deciding what he even wanted to use Ryuzo for. It rarely paid off to come unprepared. But who knew what Ryuzo’s actual motives even were.

Once Ryuzo disappeared around the corner, Jin ran toward the nearest building, climbed up the stone embankment on the way there and then up to its roof as quickly as he could manage. His arm started to hurt really badly after doing that but he needed to go up to take a good look around. What worried him was that the roofs here weren’t even as safe as they usually would have been, with just an occasional archer perched at the edge, if that. Not when that mainlander was around. Jin still didn’t know his name but he supposed that since he was a son of that Lord Mizuchi whom he'd killed in Umugi Cove, he was probably called that after his death. Not that it mattered. Hopefully, he was going to be dead soon as well and no longer a problem. Then the hostage could be rescued, though getting her back south to Omi Village was going to be its own challenge.

From above, the town still appeared to be completely empty. The lanterns, both the paper ones hanging along roads, some of them ripped or missing, and the stone ones, were unlit, and there were no other lights visible in the houses, no footprints in the snow anywhere and no other signs of anyone being here recently as far as Jin could see. It was eerily quiet, too, save for the creaking of the mill wheel in the distance.

It still smelled of dye in the town, even though it had been months since Jin’s intervention and no dye should have been made here in all this time. But everything had been abandoned suddenly, too, and some must have been left in storage or half-made.

There was a whole other part of the town on the other side of the river but it also seemed to be dark and empty from where Jin was. He was going to go there next, but for now Ryuzo started climbing the snow-covered stairs up to where the single red maple tree was growing, to where Jin’s father had been killed and to where the other _thing_ had happened, and Jin moved to the side of the roof facing in that direction carefully to take a closer look. He realized that someone was standing there right before Ryuzo did.

His hand went to his bow on its own but he hesitated when the person moved. It was a woman. She was wearing dark-colored samurai armor and carrying a naginata and while Jin couldn’t really tell from this distance, it must have been the woman he’d met in Umugi Cove, the one who was called Lady Kiyo. Which meant there were more of them here than just the samurai. Who knew how many more. That warranted additional caution but the woman had already noticed Ryuzo, though she made no move to attack him as he approached her. He didn’t draw his sword either, but he still stopped a fair distance away from her. Then he removed his hat.

“We meet again," the woman said, nodding in acknowledgment, and for a moment Jin thought that she had somehow seen _him_.

But she was clearly talking to Ryuzo.

Of course, Ryuzo had been so _bored_ after all, Jin thought. He felt himself getting angry immediately at the understanding of what that might have meant. He took his bow into his hands and nocked an arrow. If he was fast, he could take both Ryuzo and that woman out without causing any commotion, though he wasn’t convinced if it was necessary to kill her at all. He had killed only one woman so far, the one he had duelled in Old Yarikawa, because she had given him no other choice, and he would have preferred to stop at that.

“I assume you coming here isn’t a coincidence,” the woman continued. “How did you find us here? And where were you all this time? You're still looking for employment?"

“I’m looking for that woman you’ve abducted now," Ryuzo told her.

Jin lowered his bow. He wanted to see where this was going in the end.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about," even as the woman said that, she took her naginata into her hand. "You've found employment elsewhere?"

Instead of facing her, Ryuzo looked up at Jin, which in turn drew Jin’s attention to the weird feeling of being observed by someone.

Someone behind him.

"Jin!" Ryuzo called out to him. 

Then he parried the swing of the woman's naginata, even though he had appeared to be distracted just a moment ago, and then he hit her across the face with the hilt of his sword.

Jin moved aside when someone lunged at him from the back. It was the mainlander, he realized. Which was to be expected. How he had managed to locate him was unclear to Jin, though maybe the woman had served as a decoy.

The forward momentum made the samurai fall onto his knees, balancing at the very edge of the roof. The katana in his hand was shining in the moonlight. It might have been what Ryuzo had seen, a glint of its blade over Jin's head. Jin was pretty sure he would have realized he was being attacked on his own in time, though that didn't matter anymore. He dropped the bow and reached for his sword. But before he could do anything, the mainlander lost his balance entirely and fell down from the roof with some of the snow, landing on the ground on his stomach with a thud. His katana ended up some distance away from him and while he was trying to get up and reach it, he was as good as dead, Jin thought, ready to jump down to finish him off, mirroring what that man had done to him in Umugi Cove. He was stopped by Ryuzo walking up to the samurai and striking him down with his sword, killing him instantly. At least Ryuzo didn't seem to be on their side in the end.

He had apparently broken that woman's nose, too, and she was bleeding profusely now and had dropped her naginata entirely to cover her face with her hands. And at the sight of the other mainlander being killed, she made a sound like that of a wounded animal.

Things were going well, Jin thought. Now it was just a matter of finding the hostage.

"Where is she?" Ryuzo asked, turning around to address the woman, apparently having the same idea.

He didn't get any answer from her.

Jin started considering what to do next but before he made any decision, the doors of the three buildings surrounding the square around the tree opened and samurai in clan Oga colors started coming out. Around two dozen of them in total, Jin counted, way too many for this to look any good, especially for Ryuzo. Though they were also looking up at him, some of them reaching for their bows and aiming at him.

They must have been hiding there for a long time for the snow to cover up all of their tracks so well, Jin thought, without any lights or the warmth of a fire and somehow not even making any sounds that could have been heard outside the buildings. It must have still been worth it to have a chance to capture him, he supposed. They had also done nothing to help that mainlander. But he hadn't been one of them and therefore probably hadn't been worth saving in their eyes at all.

Ryuzo stopped in his tracks. He had asked Jin to kill him specifically in a situation such as this but even considering that, Jin still couldn't force himself to take his bow and shoot him and just stayed frozen in place. Even though he could have been running away already.

Some of the samurai were carrying torches that they now lit up and in their light, Lord Shimura came out last, wearing his red clan Shimura armor with the black and golden jinbaori over it. Jin felt a wave of relief wash over him at the sight of his uncle even despite the situation. At least he was really still alive and unharmed.

He was the only one wearing Shimura colors out of all those samurai, which looked really unnatural to Jin, but he supposed that was how things were now, no thanks to what he'd done, and that while Lord Shimura might have still been the jito of Tsushima he, just like Jin had suspected, didn't seem to have much actual power anymore. But despite that he was right where he should be, if he wanted to capture the Ghost.

“That woman from Omi Village is in Castle Shimura,” Lord Shimura spoke up, answering Ryuzo's earlier question, though Jin didn't know if that was even his intention.

Jin could try fighting his way through these samurai with Ryuzo, he supposed, but there was no way he would have won in his current condition without resorting to Ghost tactics. There was no hostage to save here in the end and even if she had been here, Lord Shimura wouldn't have allowed any harm to come to her, that much Jin was sure of, and he could actually return her to Omi Village, too, without having to deal with the passage through Fort Kaminodake being as difficult as it was now. Jin had nothing to do here anymore, which meant he could run. And considering his advantageous position, he could have probably still succeeded at actually running away, too.

Except, what would have been the point? He suddenly felt very weary, like he had sometimes lately. He couldn't have allowed his uncle to take his head months ago because back then the Mongols had been still around and his fight hadn't been over yet. But now? Why not? He was supposed to go back to Yuna but going to her with Ryuzo in tow would have just been a slap in the face.

“What are you doing?” Ryuzo asked when Jin started climbing down from the roof.

He was still holding onto his sword. And maybe he was still counting on Jin killing him, too.

“I’m surrendering,” Jin said once he reached the ground and turned around. Then he took his swords out of his obi and dropped them to the ground.

After he did that, he and Ryuzo were immediately captured and hauled away, without any orders that Jin could hear and without Ryuzo putting up much of a fight in the end. Maybe he was just too surprised. The samurai had apparently come prepared, ready to do precisely that. Lord Shimura didn't say anything, as much as Jin hoped he would.

The samurai took them into one of the abandoned houses, tied them up and put them against opposite walls from each other. One of them lit the hearth in the middle of the room so they wouldn't freeze. Then they were left alone.

“Why did you do that?” Ryuzo asked.

"You could have still fought," Jin pointed out.

Ryuzo didn't deem that with an answer. He would have been dead already then, Jin thought, but if his intention was not getting captured, that would have worked well enough. Except neither of them was even thinking clearly at this point. These past two days were proof enough of that.

Ryuzo didn't have his hat anymore and since he had been struggling more than Jin had been when they had been being tied up, his hair was down. There was some blood on his face, probably that samurai's he'd killed. Jin liked him like that. He was at least going to have something nice to look at before he died, he thought.

"Why?" Ryuzo asked him again.

“There is no hostage here. She is safe already."

“We will be executed."

Jin nodded. He was aware of that. But at the very least, he thought, maybe his uncle's position was going to improve after he was going to be the one to have captured both him and Ryuzo. 

He attempted to position his arms differently. The gash on his forearm was squeezed under the plates of the armor and the ropes and it was starting to really hurt but there was also nothing he could do about that, he realized after a moment, and forced himself to stop squirming.

Ryuzo was looking at him closely throughout all that, maybe counting on him somehow freeing himself. Why would he even be trying, though.

“I’ll ask for us to be allowed to commit suicide instead," Jin said. "Together. Right here. Under that tree.”

“You’re not right in the head,” Ryuzo actually sounded disgusted.

Maybe, Jin thought. But Ryuzo had been at least somewhat aware of that already, so why was he acting so surprised now?

"You asked me yourself to kill you if you were captured," Jin pointed out.

"Kill me. Precisely to avoid _this_. Not get us both killed by your uncle. You still roll over at the mere sight of him, Jin? I thought that was over."

"I defeated the Mongols, Ryuzo. I'm done. And I understand that you wanted to die instead of being captured like this but if you meant what you said earlier about loving me, then die with me."

Ryuzo had told him he would have killed himself if he had been the one to win their fight at Castle Shimura, hadn't he? This was his chance, Jin supposed. Not like either of them really deserved anything better anyway.

"You think that's romantic somehow?" Ryuzo asked.

Jin did, but he didn't say that out loud.

"Not like I had any choice anymore once they had shown up like that," Ryuzo continued, "but you could have at least tried running away. Who am I kidding… You would have actually managed to run away."

“You shouldn’t have gone out of hiding when I told you not to," Jin said. Ryuzo had trusted his plans back during the war, hadn't he, he thought, so why not now. That had been their mistake. If he could have just taken a good look around first, without Ryuzo distracting him, he was sure that he would have noticed those samurai being there somehow. 

"I was supposed to help you, not let you go alone. And if I wasn't there with you, that guy on the roof would have…"

"I knew he was there."

"Of course." Ryuzo shrugged. "I guess, you made it through the war somehow. But now you seem to have a death wish."

“Why did that woman know you already?” Jin changed the topic.

Ryuzo stopped looking at him then and started staring at the ground instead.

Why did he have to be like that, Jin thought.

“Because I stole my horse from _them_ ,” Ryuzo said. “And some ronin who served them caught me doing that, actually, but when I fought my way through several of them, she showed up and offered to hire me."

"You were working for these mainlanders?" Jin felt sick at the thought. Whatever suspicions he had had were proving to be correct. And he was suddenly so angry that he would have murdered Ryuzo with his bare hands right then and there if only they weren't tied up. And he would have been happy about having done that for once.

"Only for a bit," Ryuzo said, as if that changed anything. "I went to Umugi Cove with them. It was already theirs. And I did hear about what you had done there. That they'd had the Thief. I realized then that you weren't going to be in the best of shapes if I met you again. It was after Khenbish had already shown up and I had already decided that I wanted to try looking for you, so I eventually went back to the Mongols. And then I did find you. Those mainlanders gave me that horse when I was leaving, as payment for that time. Since it was meant to be for that lord whom you had killed anyway."

Jin wasn't even interested in what Ryuzo had been actually doing there during _that time_ to earn that payment. It was probably better for him to never learn that at all.

“You lied to me about that," he said, “when we talked before coming here."

"And you would have expected me to right out tell you that, Jin? You would have killed me. I wanted to show you first that I was not loyal to them anymore."

"They hired a traitor."

"You said they wanted to hire you as well."

“I’m not… Not like you.” Jin stopped talking, because what was even _the point_.

Ryuzo looked up at him. And Jin was surprised by how vulnerable he looked. It reminded him of how Ryuzo had been begging him to let him join his side before their fight at Castle Shimura.

“So, that’s how it ends then?" Ryuzo asked. "What about your friends in Jogaku?”

“They will probably be better off without me anyway.”

"But you didn't agree with me when I told you that. We could have left, Jin, maybe gone to the mainland somehow, if you just wanted to be gone to stop causing problems here."

Jin decided not to point out how much trust that would have taken, trust he did not have in Ryuzo, for obvious reasons.

"I had things to do," he said instead. He always had, he thought, Fort Kaminodake, then, right away, saving that hostage woman. But he was actually done now. Yuna might have been waiting for him but she was going to be fine without him and it was better for her not to meet him again at all than meet him so smitten with the man who had been responsible for her brother's death. If she was going to learn about the whole thing eventually, she could despise him all she wanted. Because he certainly deserved that. 

Ryuzo started trying to free himself by pulling on the ropes then, as if that could ever work. Well, sometimes it did, Jin had to concede, thinking back to how he’d freed himself after Taka’s death. But it seemed to him that it was not that kind of a moment and that they were really going to die. And the one good thing about that was that at least he wouldn't have to ever kill Ryuzo himself. Again.

“I survived that fight with you," Ryuzo muttered, it seemed more so to himself than to Jin, "only to die like this…” He continued struggling with the ropes.

Ryuzo's life was hard-won, Jin supposed, which might have been making him reluctant to just give it up. But Jin's own life had been miraculously saved, too, multiple times, and yet he was ready for it to end. The difference might have been that he had served his purpose and who knew what Ryuzo's purpose even _was_.

“We met again," Jin pointed out.

“Yeah, but we could have at least actually fucked."

Ryuzo finally slumped down.

“I don’t regret what we did get to do.” Jin didn't, just like he'd said earlier in the day.

“Great, Jin. I will be thinking about that in my last moments."

There was nothing in particular to talk about after that, at least nothing that Jin would have deemed important enough to devote this time to, and they went quiet, but he was still glad that he wasn’t alone. Ryuzo’s mere presence at least kept him distracted, stopping him from thinking about his clan, his father’s legacy, ending up like this. After everything he'd done and sacrificed for his people, this was his reward, to end up being killed by them like a criminal, in the very same place where his father had been murdered.

No wonder his ancestors hadn't been talking to him, Jin thought. They might have already known back then. He wondered if they were going to stay silent once he was on the other side with them, too.

The shoji door opened then and two samurai came inside the house. Not the same ones as before.

“Lord Shimura wants to talk to you,” one of them said, addressing Jin as if he was a commoner.

Ryuzo looked at Jin and nodded when Jin was pulled to his feet, as if he wanted to assure him that he was going to be fine on his own.

Jin wanted to see him again but he wasn't sure if he was going to. Maybe they were going to be dealt with separately in the end. It might have been it, he thought.

He was led out of the building.

Outside, it had started to snow. 

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jin being known for defeating some bandits when he was sixteen is actually canon. There is NPC dialogue about that, though I only heard it myself while playing NG+, and strangely enough they mention his actual age at the time, which admittedly doesn't happen all that often in this game lol


	8. Sago Mill 3

Only two samurai with him, Jin thought, and nearly total darkness. The light of the torch one of the samurai was carrying was as far as anything could be seen at all, beyond it, there was just a curtain of falling snow. If he would have pulled his arm out of the grasp of the samurai who was holding onto it and rolled under a building and then hid somewhere, nobody would have found him.

He, on the other hand, knew this town quite well at this point and he'd just refreshed his memory by looking at it from above. He would have cut the ties on his arms with something, then killed one of the samurai who would have started looking for him and taken his swords. And he would have been set at that point. He would have run to the farmstead to get his horse and then he would have been gone, the only thing missing being his own swords, leaving Ryuzo behind to get executed by Lord Shimura. Maybe that was just what Ryuzo _deserved_ anyway, to get to know how it felt to be betrayed by one's oldest friend.

But he was not going to do that.

"So, you're the Ghost," one of the samurai spoke up. "You don't look like much," he clearly sounded disappointed, which was something Jin got a lot when some people realized both that he was the Ghost and that he wasn't actually a ten feet tall demon with fangs down to his waist, like they had heard somewhere. These samurai had not seen him fight either. He was sure they would have been more impressed then.

He didn't say anything back and he didn't run away in the end. They stopped in front of a house by the river with some lights inside which could barely be seen through the snow. It must have been where Lord Shimura was staying. The creaking of the mill wheel was much louder here.

"You're not coming out of there alive, are you?" the samurai asked.

Jin still wasn't used to being addressed so casually by them and it rubbed him the wrong way, but he knew he didn't deserve anything better in their eyes now anyway and he didn't react to this either.

He was led inside the house then and forced to his knees in front of the hearth in the middle of the room. Then the two samurai left. 

The room was empty.

The snow on Jin's clothes started to melt from the warmth of the fire. His arm hurt and even the arrow wound on his back that hadn't been bothering him much so far started to be painful as well. It must have been either the difference in temperature or having his hands tied behind his back this long starting to get to him. The warmth of the fire and the forced stillness actually made him sleepy after a while, even though this was not the right situation for that at all. At least the next time he was going to sleep it was going to be forever.

Lord Shimura entered the room through the shoji door on the other side some time later. He was still wearing the clan Shimura armor but he had the Sakai tanto in his obi now next to his own swords.

It must have been meant for him, Jin thought, and since it hadn't been used yet after he had oiled it earlier, he shivered at the thought of how pristine it was going to look once unsheathed before he would use it one last time.

Lord Shimura looked appropriately unimpressed with him and Jin instantly felt as if he'd done something wrong, which was obviously the case, though what his mind was inadvertently doing was trying to nitpick something about his presentation or posture that wasn't quite perfect so he could correct it. That was how it used to be once, a mere look from his uncle could have sent him into a spiral of wondering about what minor mistake he'd made. It had been beneficial, up to a point, it was how he'd become a samurai worthy of the name in the first place after all. And part of him must have still been yearning for the simplicity of those times when all he'd had to do had been satisfying his uncle's expectations, though even back then he had been doing things behind his uncle’s back that his uncle wouldn't have approved of, more often than not with Ryuzo by his side.

He still felt like kneeling properly before his lord, too. Telling Lord Shimura he still lived to serve him. Though making Ryuzo say that to _him_ had twisted the meaning of those words somewhat in his mind for now. There was no particular reason anymore for him to show any deference to Lord Shimura though and he did his best not to even lower his head. After all, Lord Shimura himself had been kneeling in front of him when he’d beaten him in their duel. And Jin was only in this position out of his own choice. 

“Where is your mask?” Lord Shimura asked him, as if he had been expecting never to encounter him again without it on his face. 

It was in saddlebags with his horse, Jin thought, which was actually fortunate because he preferred for it to end up wherever it was going to end up once he wasn’t going to make it back to that farmstead than for Lord Shimura to have it after his death, since it represented precisely the part of him that had nothing to do with him. 

"The man I came to fight here had already seen my face," Jin said.

"You weren't wearing it either when you went through Fort Kaminodake earlier today. What you were wearing though was the Sakai clan armor. While you were having samurai killed with poisoned arrows."

The reports of that incident that had reached Lord Shimura being this specific wasn’t something Jin had exactly expected, though he had been counting on the news spreading.

“I’m ready to pay for my crimes,” he said. What he was not ready for was having a whole conversation about why he'd had to do that.

“Good.” Lord Shimura walked around him and kneeled down behind his back to cut the ties on his arms. 

Jin turned around to face him, loosening the armor on his wounded arm immediately once his hands were free. 

“That Lord Mizuchi really did injure your arm,” Lord Shimura observed.

“He did.”

“Too bad he was as lost as you. You were my responsibility, but because I failed, those were the kind of people that the shogunate sent here. He showed up at Castle Shimura in the middle of the night to boast about using you to kill his father because he wanted his mistress for himself and about setting up bandit camps and abducting women to lure you places, while me and Lord Oga had to listen to that and nod.”

"He's dead now," Jin said. That had been taken care of, too. And hopefully, once Jin was gone, his supporters weren't going to be pursued as relentlessly anymore and this was going to end.

From up close, Lord Shimura appeared to be older than Jin remembered him being the last time he'd seen him, even though it had only been a few months, with more wrinkles around his eyes and his skin more translucent and taut over the bones in his face than before. The difference was starker than the mere passage of time would have warranted and Jin was worried, though there was no way he could have said anything. Lord Shimura must have been through a lot. But now that he was going to be able to give the shogun the Ghost’s head, his standing was surely going to improve. And maybe he was going to be smarter about preparing for the next war now. Maybe he was going to finally get the kind of heir who was going to meet all his expectations, too, one way or another.

"I followed him when he said he was going to kill you,” Lord Shimura continued, “but I did not want this to happen here, Jin, where your father died, that is an unnecessary cruelty to you…" He was holding the Sakai tanto he'd used to cut the ties on Jin's arms and the blade was shimmering with the reflected light of the fire.

But maybe it was only fitting, Jin thought, considering that he had fought Lord Shimura the previous time in front of his father's grave, under another red maple tree.

Lord Shimura handed him the tanto. Just like that. Though they had already said their goodbyes before that fight and Jin agreed that that had been enough.

He felt tempted to just take it and use it and be done with it all, except a part of him still wanted to see Ryuzo again. It was foolish to want something like this, he thought, but on the other hand, what difference did it even make to anyone.

"I want to die with Ryuzo by my side," he said.

Lord Shimura's face lost all color. He took the tanto back and got to his feet.

Jin looked up at him.

"When I asked you for a warrior's death, you did not give it to me," Lord Shimura said.

It was hardly the same, Jin thought. That, Lord Shimura could have always corrected with his own hands, though Jin was grateful that he hadn't. 

"Ryuzo," Lord Shimura continued. "What is he doing here anyway? How come he's still alive?"

Jin realized that if he would have killed himself already, Lord Shimura wouldn’t have even asked him about that. He supposed it didn't even really matter to him.

"I thought he died, too," he said. "I fought him at Castle Shimura. But he survived somehow."

Jin followed Lord Shimura with his gaze as he walked back to the other side of the hearth.

"He served the Khan." Lord Shimura sat down, though he instantly looked as if he wanted to get back to his feet and pace.

"I've forgiven him." That wasn't quite _true_ , Jin thought, but it was also unexplainable otherwise. "He serves me now."

"I really should have given more thought to whom I let you be friends with in the first place.” Lord Shimura rubbed his face before he caught himself doing that and stopped. “I will have him beheaded.”

Jin nodded. That did not bother him.

“You will do it in the morning, in public,” Lord Shimura said. “And I will send you back now."

He got to his feet, probably to go call the guards.

“I want to ask you something, uncle,” Jin spoke up. “Since we’re here. And I came here to save the same woman my father was trying to save back then. And you happen to be here as well. Tell me what you know about his death.”

"Your father was killed by bandits, Jin," Lord Shimura said, though he stopped before reaching the door.

He had been, Jin thought, he had seen it with his own eyes, but there were all those other rumors, too, and he had since learned that this had been the story behind Hiranori Nagao's death as well, except it hadn’t been true.

"I believed that, all my life,” he said. “But how did bandits go from Toyotama to Kamiagata with a hostage girl in tow when there were realistically only two places where they could cross? One of which was Castle Shimura. And why did no other samurai help us? Why had my father even taken me with him?”

“What difference will it make for you to know that at this point?" 

“It will put my mind at rest.”

“It won’t.”

“Why?” Jin felt his stomach tie itself in knots. Maybe Ryuzo had been right, he thought. _Conveniently_ , Lord Shimura was the only person left alive who could have known what had really happened then. "Because _you_ arranged for him to be killed?”

“What makes you think that?”

"I heard you didn't always agree with him." 

"Who told you that?" 

"It doesn't matter. They wouldn't have lied.”

“Walk with me.”

“Just like that?” Jin motioned to the ropes lying on the floor.

“If you would have liked to run away, you would have run away anyway.”

Jin got to his feet and left the house with Lord Shimura then. It had stopped snowing outside in the meantime and it was possible to walk around without a torch. A thick layer of fresh snow was covering everything now and sparkling in the moonlight. Lord Shimura headed to the square with the red maple tree. The snow had already covered up any signs of the earlier fight there.

“I wouldn’t kill my own brother in law, Jin, using bandits to do that,” Lord Shimura said, stopping under the tree.

"Then why won't you tell me what happened? Everyone but us, all the other samurai, are dead anyway."

Lord Shimura looked up at the tree as if it itself held some answers.

"These bandits went through Fort Kaminodake," he said.

He could have told him years ago, Jin thought.

"Out of the two men your father sent to Fort Kikuchi to get help when he followed them, one went missing and the other one managed to run away after he was nearly killed. There was something going on in Omi Village as well. It made your father decide that you were going to be safer going with him rather than staying there. And I was too late to save him, but not for the lack of trying. Clan Kikuchi arranged this."

"Why?" Jin asked, thinking back to the first time he'd gone to the Kikuchi estate himself before the war and about what he had been trying to do back then because he hadn't known any better.

"Kikuchis were originally an offshoot of Clan Yarikawa. They did not take Yarikawa's side when the Yarikawa Rebellion started, but they still weren't happy with what Lord Sakai had done during that time.”

Not that Jin knew what he had done. He had heard things here and there, but he had never learned what was true and what was just a story repeated by people. But there was no use prying into that, he supposed.

"They separated from Yarikawa hundreds of years ago," he pointed out.

"Which means they have been allies for hundreds of years. Against all the other clans, in that case. After Yarikawa had been defeated, they decided to try to limit the number of clans on our side, too, and went after the one that happened to be the smallest one at the time first. It was a time of chaos, they were counting on the other clans not starting another war over this. And we didn’t."

"You would have never told me," Jin realized.

"You were not supposed to know."

"You wanted me to become the jito of Tsushima one day, whit Kikuchis having murdered my father and me never knowing about that..." Jin kneeled down around the place where his father's body had fallen all those years ago and touched the snow on the ground. Lord Shimura had been right. This was not putting his mind to rest. It was more disconcerting than anything. Even if every last one of the Kikuchis was dead now. 

Or more precisely, of the Kikuchi men, he thought. He wasn’t sure of the fate of the women and children but when he had been in Fort Kikuchi during the war it had been completely taken over by Lady Hana and her men and considering what she had done to her own sister's family, the Kikuchi women and children had most likely suffered the same fate, unless some of them hadn’t even been there by the time she’d shown up.

"Have you heard anything about any Kikuchi women and children surviving the war?" he asked, straightening up.

"If I hear something, I'll try to help them." Lord Shimura seemed to be glad about the change of topic. "The widows and orphans of our samurai are welcome to seek assistance at Castle Shimura. Some of them are living there now, but not any Kikuchis. And it's been a while."

Why would he have expected anything different, Jin thought. 

"I was recently informed of a woman who might have been a Kikuchi servant heading to Kin Sanctuary with a child though," Lord Shimura added, "maybe still not knowing any better. I will send someone there to check."

"Thank you," Jin said.

\---

Ryuzo was woken up by Jin being brought back, which was a bit unexpected, him making it back at all. He was put back in the same place as before, though his hands were tied in the front now and clearly not as tightly. The ropes were just for show, Ryuzo realized, because of Jin's injury, most likely, and the fact that there was no real need to restrain him, something the samurai must have realized by now, because Jin was apparently going to die willingly.

'Why do I have to take part in this at all', Ryuzo thought, pulling on his own ties to no avail again.

He had been counting on meeting Jin again when he had learned of his whereabouts and somehow still making it out alive. Even if he might not have deserved to. But Jin apparently had other ideas about that.

"Kikuchis killed my father," he spoke up. As if that mattered, after all those years, and in this very moment. "Not my uncle."

In the end, Ryuzo didn't care what samurai clans had been trying to eradicate one another all those years ago either way. 

"That is what you're concerned about?" he asked.

"Why are you upset?"

"Because you are going to kill us?"

"You were in Omi Village when my father came here with me back then. What was going on there?"

"Hell if I cared, Jin. My mother got sick. I was sitting at her bedside, crying my eyes out."

Jin grew quiet. Maybe he was starting to realize that it was not all about _him_ , Ryuzo thought. Ryuzo's mother had lived in the end but that couldn't have diminished his terror at the time.

"You never told me about that," Jin said.

The hearth was barely burning at this point and it was already getting much too cold for comfort. And it was going to get even colder and darker, Ryuzo thought. Until, in the morning, it was all going to be over. 

"A lot was going on." Ryuzo shrugged. "By the time we had a chance to talk again at all, at Castle Shimura, there was no point anymore in me telling you that. Not like you lacked your own problems either. Jin, whatever you have learned about your father's death, leave it at that, and let's go. If they're stupid enough not to even tie you up properly..."

"I don't want to go anywhere anymore," Jin sounded very tired which, Ryuzo supposed, must have been actually the case, with him not sleeping for as long as Ryuzo had been following him. Could it have been just about that, he wondered. Then again, what was it that was keeping Jin from sleeping in the first place.

"If you want to run away without me though, we can arrange that," Jin spoke up, looking right at him.

And Ryuzo found himself listening intently to him, even if he suspected that it was not a viable option for him to take at all.

"You're right," Jin continued. "I can probably free myself easily now. The worst thing that will happen is I'll pull the stitches on my wound. Which won't matter either way soon. Then I can free you and you can try your luck with the guards outside. Maybe you'll manage to run away, even unarmed. Leaving me right when I need you is what you usually do, after all."

"You're still testing my loyalty, Lord Sakai?" Ryuzo scoffed.

"You know how it works. Even if your lord is an idiot, you must still be ready to die for him."

"Not a rule you live by yourself."

"But it's still one I want _you_ to live by."

'More like die by', Ryuzo thought bitterly.

"I surrendered to stay by your side," Jin said, "even though I could have run away. And when my uncle wanted me to kill myself already when I was taken to him, in private, I told him that I'd rather die with you. Whatever that made him think."

Jin looked him in the eye.

"I don't want to, but I love you, too," he said.

That was it, Ryuzo thought then. He was not going to leave after that.

That part of his life that had been gifted to him by him surviving the fight with Jin in the first place was now coming to an end. Was it a better end, he wondered. Was it somehow making Jin happy? Did he really think that was all they deserved?

Ryuzo had been drawn to him again like a moth to a flame. And now, he was going to burn.

  



	9. Sago Mill 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm honestly sorry there are so many Sago Mill chapters lol This is the last one, though. My original idea was that every chapter would be just one location but it turns out that would have resulted in very long chapters with very infrequent updates.
> 
> Taichi is that guy who is at the Sakai Estate with Yuriko when Jin first goes there. He doesn't appear again but I guess he may still be around.

The morning came with a clear sky and the vivid colors of the sunrise. Everyone's breaths were clouds in the air. 

The ground was painfully cold when they were made to kneel on it. Jin had imagined this happening under the red maple tree but he could see how Lord Shimura wouldn't have considered that a good idea at all. They were by the river instead, facing it, about halfway between the two mill wheels, and in the daylight, this was a disorderly place, with blue dye spilled here and there out of barrels peeking from under the snow. There were better places to die on this island, Jin thought, looking around. And even in this town. So many better places, actually. He doubted this one had been chosen by his uncle at all.

“Where’s Lord Shimura?” he asked when one of the samurai approached him to cut the ties on his wrists with the Sakai tanto.

“He left,” the samurai answered.

He sheathed the tanto once he was done and gave it to Jin before walking away.

As far as Jin could see, there were fewer samurai around them now than there had been the previous night. Some of them must have accompanied Lord Shimura to wherever he'd gone to, that samurai woman, too, apparently, since she didn't seem to be anywhere around either.

Jin wondered why his uncle had already left in the first place. Maybe he didn't want to see him die after all. The previous time they had fought, Lord Shimura had seemed ready to take his head himself, but maybe, in the end, he wasn't. Or, more likely, he was just disappointed with him wanting to die alongside Ryuzo. He might have even heard something back in the day, Jin thought, his stomach clenching in shame at the thought, though he had never felt as if his uncle had known about anything. Not that it was impossible. He might have been aware of what that was actually about. And even if he wasn't, the idea might have still been unacceptable for him. After all, Jin himself, at one point, wouldn't have accepted it either.

He looked sideways at Ryuzo. When he had offered to free him last night, Ryuzo hadn’t taken him up on that offer, thankfully. Because him leaving at this point would have been unimaginably painful, especially after Jin had confessed to him.

The samurai were not untying Ryuzo, though. Apparently, just like Lord Shimura had told Jin last night, they were just going to behead him. Jin wondered what their instructions were about what to do with their bodies once they were going to be dead. Did they actually need their heads for anything and were going to take them and how they were going to dispose of what was left, considering the ground here was still frozen and it was unlikely that they could be buried. But did that mean that their bodies were going to be burned or actually just dropped into the pile of corpses in one of buildings here that Jin had looked at during the war, that must have still been there, still waiting for the spring. At least it was unlikely that they were going to be separated. There was no real reason for that. And that was more than they might have ever gotten under any other circumstances, because of their original difference in station.

Ryuzo seemed upset, but it wasn’t the time and place for that, Jin thought, right before Ryuzo opened his mouth anyway to say something.

“Are you stupid?” he asked, addressing the samurai. “You’re going to kill the man who stopped the Mongol invasion for you? Just so you’ll have an easier time taking over this island yourselves? And then, what are you going to do when the Mongols return? Because they will. And the way it's going, they are just going to slaughter all of you again."

Jin wondered if those samurai knew who Ryuzo was. Because if they did, it would have been better for him to keep quiet about things like that. It would have been better either way.

They just ignored him. Which was to be expected. They were only following orders anyway, what could have they said? It had happened a few times during the war that some of the retainers that had arrived as part of the troops the shogun had sent to Tsushima had defected and joined the Ghost's side instead, eager to actually fight and not sit around waiting for orders, but Jin didn't really count on this happening anymore at this point. 

One of the samurai took out his sword and started walking toward Jin. His beheader, Jin supposed. It was high time he started putting that death poem together in his head, he thought, his grip on the tanto tightening. Too bad he hadn't gotten a chance to put down anything in writing. He could have asked to do that but he had technically already written a death poem before his fight with Lord Shimura and in his uncle's eyes, that one was probably still valid, even if at this point Jin might have wanted to go with one that wasn't all about his uncle, but rather...

The samurai didn't make it. He fell down with an arrow in the side of his head. And Jin looked over his shoulder to see another one falling down like that behind him. He squinted his eyes, looking up toward the rooftops. There was a silhouette of someone up there, stark against the intense pink background of the morning sky behind her. Yuna, Jin realized. She shot two more arrows in quick succession, one of which ended up in the head of another samurai. But some of the other ones were wearing helmets and they were already drawing their swords and reaching for their own bows and arrows.

And Jin was looking at this happening with a sinking feeling in his stomach. He had waited too long, he thought, gripping his tanto even tighter. Yuna had somehow learned of the situation and had come for him, probably feeling the same way he had when he had learnt that she'd been taken hostage in Umugi Cove. She couldn't have known that this had been his own choice. How could she have, when he had promised her he was going to come back to her. 

“Lucky bastard,” Ryuzo muttered at his side, loud enough for him to hear. 

Yuna started climbing down from the roof before any arrows could reach her. From several directions, more of Jin's allies appeared, Daikoku and his men, Lady Sanjo and her ronin. The samurai were now surrounded but they were also skilled swordsmen wearing armor and there were still about ten of them left. And Jin could see this situation unfolding with his mind's eye, with swords clashing and arrows flying and with casualties inevitably falling on both sides. He made his decision then and moved to cut the ties on Ryuzo’s arms and legs. Right when he was done, Yuna threw something in their direction and then everything around them was gone in a cloud of smoke. Jin could imagine what she expected of him, considering that he was holding his tanto in his hand. 

Yuna had been right back when she’d convinced him to start killing Mongols dishonorably during the war. There had been no other way to defeat them then, or even to survive long enough to do anything. But this was different, Jin thought, because he was truly going to do this for his own selfish reasons, just to protect his allies, while endangering the peace he had worked so hard for, and it was also worse, when he was targeting his own people, ones who had not strayed from the right path, either, and were just following orders, not unreasonable ones at that. Still, he had no choice, unless he wanted to see some of his supporters dead because they had come to rescue him out of a situation that he'd ended up in only because of his own poor decision-making.

This might not have been his time to go, after all, he thought, and if he needed a sign, this was it.

He got to his feet. Obscured by the smoke, the samurai were just shadows anyway, not that much different from Mongols at all other than for their calls to each other in Japanese that Jin did his best not to listen to at all. He crept up behind one of them and grabbed his head, pulling it back to expose his throat, muffling his screams with his hand at the same time. The hold was almost intimate like that, with the samurai's body flush against his own for the briefest moment. When Jin remembered the first time he had done this, dragging the Mongol to the ground, stabbing him blindly in the chest and neck, ending up under him, soaked with his blood, he marveled at how much better he had gotten at this since then. He slit the samurai’s throat and let him slide to the ground. Then he moved to the next one, not encountering any real resistance, and then another, positioning their bodies how he needed them and slitting their throats until he got four of them in quick succession and the smoke started dissipating. At this point, he sheathed his tanto and kneeled down to take the katana of the last samurai he’d killed from his stilling hand. He noticed the familiar scabbard with the silver fox on it in the samurai's obi while at it. For whatever reason, this man had Ryuzo’s swords, too. Jin took them, along with the scabbard of the katana he was holding in his hand, tucked everything in his own obi, got to his feet and looked around for Ryuzo now that he could see anything again, intending to give him his swords back, but there was no sign of him anywhere anymore. 

He had no time to dwell on that. Once the smoke was gone, the fight around him started and he was attacked right away, too. He needed to grip the katana he’d just picked up with both of hands to block the blow from the samurai attacking him and it took almost all he had with his injured arm. He really shouldn’t be getting into sword fights in his state, he thought. The remaining samurai were badly outnumbered now by the people Yuna had brought with her, after what he’d just done to reduce their numbers, and it was only a matter of time now until they were all going to be defeated, especially since it wasn’t like they were going to get fair one-on-one fights.

For him, it could still go both ways, though, Jin thought. The samurai who had attacked him struck again and he must have been getting an idea about how Jin’s left arm was pretty much useless. Jin barely blocked his next blow, coming at his neck. He could certainly allow this fight to go the way which ended with him lying dead in the snow anyway, just like he had wanted to a moment ago. 

But the decision was made for him again. The samurai got an arrow into his back and faltered and Jin parried his next attack easily without thinking about it at all and plunged his sword right away between the armor on the samurai's chest and his shoulder plate, feeling how bones were breaking under his blade. He had not paid attention to his arm being injured while at it and it started throbbing with pain now that he was done but he got a hold of himself to yank the sword out. A rivulet of blood appeared in the corner of the samurai’s mouth, which most likely meant he had grazed a lung. That man was going to drown in his own blood if he wasn’t going to be killed before that. Jin let him fall to the ground and finished him off. Then, as soon as he was done, he fell to his knees in front of him, too, but held onto his sword in case he needed it still, guided by instinct more than anything. His vision blurred. Blood was dripping from under the armor on his arm now, running down his hand, which was not a good sign. Around him, the ground was littered with bodies. And now he was glad that this hadn't taken place under the red maple tree in the end because that sight there would have hit way too close to home.

The fighting around him took some more time but he just kept staring at the snow-covered ground. He'd done enough, he thought, even though he could have still helped some more. He wondered where Ryuzo had gone to and if it was going to be easy to find him again, or if he had just given up on him after this, after barely making it out alive again, and left for good.

When Jin finally looked up, Daikoku’s archers were already getting down from the roofs to join everyone on the ground. All the samurai were dead. With no losses on their side, it seemed. Lady Sanjo’s ronin started looting their bodies and Jin was glad he’d gotten to Ryuzo’s swords before them. His own katana was most likely gone, though, the wakizashi, too. Lord Shimura must have taken his swords with him when he'd been leaving, since he was supposed to die anyway. And if that had been the case, he was fine with that, he decided. Because this might have been precisely the point at which he stopped deserving to wield his father's swords anymore either way. Other than the tanto, which he still had and which was irrevocably tainted anyway.

He wiped down the katana he did have in his hand and sheathed it before getting to his feet.

Yuna approached him, picking up her arrows on the way, yanking them out of dead bodies' heads. Here in the north, she was wearing a fur cape again, like back during the latter parts of the war, still over the same set of clothes she had always been wearing since Jin had met her for the first time. At least she'd replaced her lost sword and knife with way nicer ones. 

“Are you injured?" she asked, looking him over once she was close. "You're bleeding," she answered her own question when she noticed his arm.

"It happened two days ago."

"You were captured?” she didn't sound convinced, which was the right call to make, he thought, because he'd allowed it to happen.

“I was injured," he said. "And Lord Shimura was here."

"You talked to him?" she seemed concerned, her brow creasing instantly at the mention of Lord Shimura's name.

"Yes."

"Whatever he told you, Jin, he was wrong."

She must have noticed, he thought, that he was upset.

“How did you find me?” he asked to change the topic.

“I always find you when you need me," she said matter-of-factly. 

'Lucky bastard', Ryuzo's earlier words echoed in Jin's ears. Yuna had pulled him out of the clutches of death once again. Except, what for, at this point, he thought, now that the war was over. He could really use some guidance but his ancestors were quiet and he’d even lost his father’s sword, which had sometimes been showing him the way somehow, back during the war. Or at least it had seemed so to him.

"Your old servant from Omi Village, Taichi," Yuna continued. "He overheard his new samurai masters talking about you getting injured fighting some assassin from the mainland and then being lured here, to Sago Mill, all alone, so he decided to abandon his post and rode to Jogaku Temple as fast as he could to alarm 'the Ghost's army' he had heard about. I couldn't bring a whole army. But I still did my best when I heard about it. And thankfully we made it here in time, just barely..."

"And they have seen me, untied, with a tanto in my hand and not fighting for my life," Jin pointed out, softly enough so that they couldn't be overheard by the others.

"You were injured. And they don't know what you're capable of. Not exactly."

"But you do."

"Whatever you were thinking, Jin... We'll talk about that later. I came to save you because you would have done the same for me, regardless of what the situation even was. And we both know that."

"A smoke bomb?" he asked, hoping to shift the focus of the conversation away from _that_ , too, though the mention of a smoke bomb wasn't a good idea either, he realized, because it reminded him of what he'd done. Not that he needed a reminder anyway while he was still standing among the fallen bodies of his victims, their slit throats a clear sign that they hadn't been killed in an honorable way.

"Lady Sanjo still had one," Yuna answered. "Back from when you've given your bombs to her and her men before Umugi Cove. But you know how these things are made, too, right? We should make more now. Train people in using them as well."

They probably should, Jin thought. But he also wasn't convinced if he wanted that. To wage war against the samurai. For what? Yuna seemed determined about it being the right thing to do, though. For whatever reason.

"People are coming to us all the time, Jin," she said. "If their new masters mistreat them now, they have somewhere to run away to at least. That will eventually help to keep the new ruling class here in check, unless they want to end up ruling empty estates."

"They mistreat people from here?" Jin asked. He hadn't really been following what had been happening in all those estates taken over by the new samurai. But he supposed that it was not all that unexpected.

"It has always been like this. To an extent. Of course it still is."

He of course knew nothing about it always having been like that, either.

"Except those people who go north looking for 'the Ghost's army'," he spoke up, "end up finding a temple full of refugees."

He thought back to the last time he'd been in Jogaku Temple. To the dimly lit interior of the biggest building there and the smell and the noise inside. The stench of too many bodies, of the fish oil burned in lamps, of the laundry drying everywhere, the murmur of conversations and the constant crying of children. 

"But when they realize how it really is," he continued. "They have no choice at that point."

"It's still better than nothing," Yuna argued. "A way out, if they can’t take it anymore. It’s worth fighting for. And we can organize things better, too, now that the invasion is over."

Not something he’d ever signed up to fight for or to work on though, Jin thought.

"I have to go," he said. He really did, if he wanted to catch up to Ryuzo.

"What do you mean: ‘go’? You're injured."

"I'll explain it to you later."

"Who was that with you?" Yuna asked, guessing correctly that it was about that.

But it seemed that she had not recognized Ryuzo yet. And Jin felt instantly relieved, though at the same time, he felt bad about even feeling that way and hiding something like this from her.

"I have been injured for the past two days." He shrugged, though it took a lot out of him with how his arm actually was. He didn't answer Yuna's question at all, choosing to do that over trying to think up some lie on the spot. "It's not like I'm going to drop dead from this now. I'll take care of this wound, as soon as I'm able to. It'll be fine. Go back to Jogaku Temple now with everyone. I'll join you when I'm done."

"Whatever it is you have to do, I will go with you, at the very least, since I'm already here. We can take more people, too..."

"It's nothing you can help me with, Yuna. You, or anyone else.”

Her face fell.

"I appreciate you coming here for me," he said, even if he actually didn't, not exactly. "But there's something I still have to deal with on my own."

"Your uncle? Again?”

"No. Not that. Though he did tell me something…"

In the end, she let him leave. But she had made him promise her one more time that he was going to join her again, looking him straight in the eye while at it. And breaking that promise was not going to be easy now, after this, if it came to that, he thought. 

In the meantime, Daikoku's men had found his bow and quiver in one of the buildings and gave them back to him. His swords hadn't been there, though, just like he'd suspected. But the one he'd gotten from that samurai was a good sword, too. Its scabbard was dark blue, the ito and the tassels attached to the handle were also blue, though a lighter shade, and altogether it fit the place where Jin had acquired it surprisingly well. And this place wasn’t unimportant to him, either. He could live with that.

"Where's your horse?" Yuna called out after him once he started walking away on foot.

"Around," he answered over his shoulder. “I'll get it back. Don't worry.”

He headed toward the farmstead where he and Ryuzo had left their horses then.

Yuna must have been thinking that he had been acting so strangely, he thought, hiding his companion's identity from her. And she was actually aware that she'd caught him at the verge of suicide. While the others could probably be convinced indeed that he'd just been captured and forced to do that, he would have to give an actual explanation to her, eventually, if he was going to ever see her again.

He realized blood was dripping from his arm onto the snow as he was walking and that he was leaving red marks behind him, and he wrapped it up tentatively in the black cloak that went over his armor to stop the blood from falling onto the ground at least. He had not even left the town yet and the farmstead was still a fair distance away but he was already exhausted, probably because of his injury and blood loss, and everything that had happened, but having no other choice, he made steady progress, left the town, went over the field of frozen pampas grass and finally started approaching the buildings of the farmstead. Even if Ryuzo was no longer there, he could still rest there for a bit and take care of his wound before he was even going to be able to get on a horse and follow him.

Except Ryuzo was there, sitting by the fire in the center of the farmstead, all alone, with his horse nearby. Though he must have talked to the women living there to ask for their permission to stay there first.

"You're still here," Jin whispered when he saw him. 

Ryuzo was missing his hat. Another thing they'd lost, Jin thought, since he'd made no effort to search for it in Sago Mill so as not to arouse anyone's suspicions. That after he’d gone to the effort of retrieving it from Castle Kaneda in the first place and holding onto it for all this time. But in the end, it didn’t matter. At least he had Ryuzo's swords. He took them out of his obi before sitting down by Ryuzo's side and put them down between them.

Ryuzo took them.

'No _thank you_ ', Jin thought. 'Insolent bastard'. Not that he'd ever minded much.

"Still alive, Lord Sakai?" Ryuzo asked him instead.

He didn't seem surprised that Jin had shown up.

"You ran away," Jin said.

"Yes,” Ryuzo just admitted. “And that’s so strange to you? How many times have you told me that your friends from Jogaku were going to kill me on sight?"

"I untied you so you could help me."

"So, you wanted me to stay there? Because what you want after all is to see me dead? Again? It sure seems like it, Jin. And you won't stop until you succeed at that, will you?"

That was a terribly unfair thing to say, Jin thought, considering he hadn't killed Ryuzo himself so far, even if it would have been the best course of action for him in so many ways.

"I could have killed you myself so many times already," he said as much aloud. "I should have, in fact. But I didn't."

"Because you both can't bear to do that yourself again and will do your best so it'd happen anyway."

Ryuzo might have been right, Jin thought. And he didn’t really know what to say. He started to tug at the armor on his forearm, not even having the patience to take it off in a more considerate way. He just needed it gone.

"I was right wanting us both to die,” he said while at it. “When I didn't do it, what I had to do right away instead was slitting four samurai's throats in that smoke. Or see my allies, who came for me, die."

Ryuzo looked at him sceptically.

"Seriously, Jin?" he asked. "That's such a huge problem for you? You still can't stand the thought of killing samurai with your own two hands? Even while you made me kill ten of them yesterday?"

"It was not the same."

"How was it not the same? I didn't get the idea to use up all my poisoned arrows on them on my own. You made me do that. I just wanted to save your life. Which you don't even want."

Having succeeded at yanking the armor off his forearm, Jin looked at his own hands, wondering if there was any difference in the end for real, no matter what he might have been telling himself until now. Conveniently, his hands were really speckled with blood, some of it certainly not his own, something he hadn't even noticed earlier. And very cold, though warming up from the warmth of the fire now.

Obviously, this had been a slippery slope, he thought. With the way things were going, soon he was going to be taking out whole camps not of Mongols, but of samurai, before he even realized what was happening and what he was even trying to achieve. And maybe his uncle had been right all along after all and once one started to fight a war like this, it was just never going to end. The peasants that were fleeing to Jogaku Temple, too, if they had no way out, they would have just stayed where they should stay. 

But this was still better than Mongols taking over all of Japan, he thought. And if this was the sacrifice that had been necessary to stop that from happening in the first place, he probably should just be ready to make it, even if he really became a monster in the end. That would have allowed him to keep Ryuzo around, at least, because he certainly did complete the look. 

Ryuzo's hand covered his own.

"Show me that arm," he said, interrupting Jin’s thoughts.

Jin did, reluctantly.

"I'm glad you're here." Ryuzo held his wrist delicately, looking at his forearm with furrowed brow. The bandages it was covered in were soaked with blood at this point. "I thought you were going to go away with them now."

"I thought you might have gone away, too," Jin admitted.

"It would seem like the sane thing to do. At this point. It probably always was. I figured out as much once already, and I actually _left_ , but we always do find a way back to each other."

“Yes." That thing about going away being the sane thing to do, it certainly applied the other way around, too, Jin thought.

Ryuzo looked up at him and smiled. And it had been a while since Jin had last seen him smile like that.

“Where to next, then, Jin?” Ryuzo asked. 

As if it was this simple in the end, Jin thought.

“Kin Sanctuary," he said. "I need to check something there.”

He knew he needed a reason to keep going, if he was going to, for Yuna. So he'd latched onto the only thing that had come up. For better or for worse. Probably the latter.

“There isn’t much of Kin Sanctuary even left though, right?" Ryuzo asked. "From what I’ve heard.”

“Mongols burned it all down."

After they had poisoned nearly everyone there first, Jin thought, because of what he'd done. It was not going to be pleasant at all to go there again now.

“So, what is that ‘something’?"

“Maybe I’ll tell you on the way.”

“Maybe?”

“If you behave.”

  



	10. Kin Sanctuary 1

"You don't have anything better to do?" Jin asked, crouching down by Ryuzo's side.

Ryuzo was fishing close to the waterfall next to Castle Shimura, but he hadn't been here long and he hadn't caught any fish yet. He was aware that Jin liked going on walks around here, specifically when he wanted to be alone and that he came to meditate here sometimes, but he hadn't been counting on Jin showing up right now, so early in the morning, and he was only here because it was a decent fishing spot. And it must have been weeks since he'd last interacted with Jin at all. Actually, he hadn't seen him in such a long time that Jin had managed to grow a little bit of stubble on his cheeks in the meantime, which was a first, and made him look different, better. Ryuzo felt a sudden urge to touch it, even though it was out of the question for now, at least for as long as they weren't both completely drunk. 

And maybe it was out of the question entirely at this point.

"You're asking as Lord Sakai?" he asked, forcing himself to look back to his fishing rod and away from Jin's face. "Or as my friend?" 

"What's the difference?"

"In the first case, I'll head back to the castle and will at least pretend to be busy with more worthwhile things than this, and in the second I'll tell you that recruits like me aren't getting fed all that well at this time of the year and that it's been weeks since I had fish. Or meat, for that matter. So, I'm taking matters into my own hands, so to speak."

Also enjoying a little bit of free time since Jin wasn't currently training with him. When he was, it was all-consuming, because Jin was insane like that and he knew no limits in how hard he could push them both. 

Though that might have been over now as well, all things considered.

"I'm sorry," Jin said.

"It's not like it's your fault." Ryuzo shrugged. "Neither is it something we have to discuss at length. I haven't been seeing you lately. What have you been up to? I've heard you're getting married."

"Where have you heard that?" Jin flinched, as if he hadn't expected Ryuzo to know. 

Not likely, considering the amount of rumors about it, Ryuzo thought.

"Here and there," he said. "The rumor mill at the castle is a work of art, you know. And everyone is especially interested in you, for obvious reasons."

"Actually, I'd like to. It's about time." Jin dipped his fingers into the water and visibly shivered at the cold but kept his hand there anyway. "But I don't know if it will work out right now. It's not something you should be telling anyone else, though."

"Of course, Lord Sakai. It's not like I have been running around sharing your secrets with everyone so far, is it?"

He had once killed a man just to keep Jin's secrets, actually. For his own sake, too, but still.

"Why won't it work out, though?" he asked. "I've seen her, from a distance, that's it. She certainly looked respectable enough to me. She's a Kikuchi, isn't she?"

Which might have been the problem, Ryuzo thought, since Kikuchis were an offshoot of Yarikawas and that was just one of the reasons why the other clans didn't particularly like them after the Yarikawa Rebellion, though they were still samurai and still ruled a vast chunk of the island.

"My uncle isn't convinced that she is a good enough match for me," Jin said.

'Of course', Ryuzo thought, 'what else'.

"But you're convinced?" he asked. "Because I've heard that there was _something_ there already."

Ryuzo had been a bit perplexed about that, in fact, when he'd first heard about it. He had actually doubted that it could have even been true. Jin had to get married, sure, but Ryuzo had always assumed that it was going to be a purely arranged affair. Because it practically always was, and on top of that, Jin was still looking wistfully at _him_ at times, or at least it seemed so to Ryuzo, and he didn't seem to be in the right state of mind to fall for anyone else, even if it had been a year since they had broken up. But that might have been just his arrogance talking in the end.

This woman was already in the castle, she'd come here weeks ago, to be part of the jito's court for a time, supposedly, and she had already met Jin, either before that or after, and at least the rumors were that they were being seen together a lot. Which wasn't even particularly appropriate. Not that things like that never happened. Even worse happened, in fact, like Lord Adachi marrying a commoner.

"I'm convinced, pretty much," Jin said. "It's just that my uncle thinks that he can arrange someone from the mainland for me instead."

"A fair point. Centuries of intermarriage between just a few clans, no wonder he thinks you may need some new blood." 

Jin gave Ryuzo a look.

"Don't be like that," he said. "It's not about that at all." 

"But the thing is, nothing will happen if he doesn't agree, right?"

"I'll do my best." Jin withdrew his hand from the water and leaned back to look up at the waterfall instead. "I think if I'm going to spend the rest of my life on Tsushima and become its jito, eventually, I might as well marry a woman from around here, who already knows how things are here. That way, maybe she will be able to offer me some advice down the line. Besides, I enjoy her company."

Whatever, Ryuzo thought to himself. In the end, maybe Jin had come to him to gloat. 

When Ryuzo had seen that woman himself, she had been surprisingly tiny and pale, clad all in blue silks, and she had seemed to be shy and frightened as she had been walking through the castle's hallways, followed by female servants who had seemed to be way more interesting to Ryuzo than her. But she was also way out of his league and maybe she was supposed to be like that. Still, she was not the kind of person that Ryuzo would have ever expected Jin to have any actual interest in, considering that he'd been into him. More like a polar opposite. But maybe it was what Jin wanted in the end, to feel big and strong next to a woman like her. It was not that he didn't deserve to, either, it was just that Ryuzo would have never allowed that to happen at his own expense, but that was a moot point now.

"Your uncle doesn't want you to be taking advice from anyone else but him, though," he pointed out.

Jin grew quiet, probably having nothing to say to that. Just like he didn't really get a say about his own fate. In the end, no matter what he might have felt, he wasn't the one deciding whom he was going to marry. And Ryuzo felt somewhat sick at the thought. It was not just a matter of the difference in class in this case, but still, having no father, he himself was at least free to make his own decisions at this point, whatever these might have been. It had taken him a long time to even realize that, but there were ways now in which his own situation was actually more enviable than Jin's. That is, if Jin was even interested at all in being anything else or more than a good heir.

"What?" Jin asked him when he turned to look at him.

It was early spring and it was not particularly warm yet, but Jin was practically half-lying next to him, leaning back on his elbows. His posture was unusually relaxed, which almost seemed like an invitation. And while Ryuzo knew that he could be wrong about what Jin meant by being like that, he decided not to overthink it. He put the fishing rod away and tackled Jin to the ground, getting on top of him. Jin's breath smelled of sake when he got close to him. This early in the morning. Jin must have spent the night drinking. Where, and with whom, Ryuzo wondered. Something was going on, he thought, and it was apparently not good, but also, he shouldn't care. It was just that, if Jin was actually drunk, he was fair game, and Ryuzo let himself cup his cheek and pushed a hand under the kimono on his chest. 

"Such a waste, Jin," he leaned in to whisper into Jin's ear. 

Jin squirmed under him and it only served to make it better to keep him in place.

"You didn't…" Jin started saying but Ryuzo didn't really want to hear it.

"I was hoping we could have a tournament," he interrupted, smiling to himself, thinking how Jin might have expected him to say something else and reveling in the power he still held over him, or at least believed himself to still hold. "Fight each other, show off a bit," he continued. "I already asked you, the last time we talked, remember? But if you get married now, it will never happen."

Jin pushed him away a bit. His face was very red now and Ryuzo rubbed his cheek just to add to his discomfort, but then Jin drew in a shaky breath and stilled himself for something.

"You'll manage without it," he said. "You don't need to 'show off'. I know you can fight. I'll be able to hire you. Get you better food, better armor..."

There was no way Jin wasn't aware how condescending he'd just sounded, Ryuzo thought, his hand moving away from Jin's face. He had just wanted to kiss him, but now he felt like punching him in the face instead.

He sat up, straddling Jin's hips.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you, Lord Sakai?" he asked, looking down at Jin now.

"Yes." Jin nodded, as if he didn’t see the problem in that at all.

Who knew what he had come here for in the end, Ryuzo thought. What he might have wanted to ask him. He moved away and went back to fishing. Because whatever it was, he was done.

"What is your problem, Ryuzo?" Jin sat up and ran a hand through his hair.

What, indeed, Ryuzo thought to himself. He had no interest in Jin's ideas about how he could serve him, for one. And he had no intention to, actually. He'd already made up his mind about leaving this godforsaken castle, one way or another. Hopefully to be a retainer somewhere on Tsushima, just not here and not _Jin's_. And Jin was in for a surprise if he expected anything different.

"My marriage won't be like what you and me had," Jin said, as if he assumed Ryuzo was upset about him getting married. As if.

"You think I care? It'd be best for you if it was."

"But it won't. There is no one else like you. There will never be. You knew my mother, my father, you've known me since I can remember anything myself. I won't stop needing you just because I..."

"You're drunk, Jin. Go away." Ryuzo turned away pointedly.

Before he did, he'd caught Jin looking at him as if he expected him to say something else again.

But Ryuzo kept ignoring him instead, staring ahead at the water in front of him, pretending to be busy fishing, until Jin finally understood and got to his feet to go away for real.

And whatever that had been about, Jin never got married in the end and within a week they were training for that tournament together, harder than ever before, so much so that Ryuzo forgot at times where his own body ended and Jin's started, so much that there was no time to think about anything else but the next move.

It seemed to Ryuzo at the time that they were pretty evenly matched, but that turned out to be nothing more than an illusion. 

And after Jin had defeated him and stood over him, beautiful and deadly, Ryuzo realized that he really had to run, all the more acutely, because this... this was going to destroy him otherwise.

\---

And maybe he had been right, he thought, pulling his sword out of the body of a samurai in purple clan Oga armor and wiping it before placing it back in its sheath, and he really should have stayed away when he’d had the chance.

It was not exactly that Jin meant to be like this, or at least it didn’t seem so, but his influence on Ryuzo's life had turned out to be pretty negative, all things considered, and that was to put it mildly, though on the other hand, he wouldn't have had or been much without Jin either, without Jin's father and without Yuriko's willingness to feed him throughout his whole childhood. Hell, he might have even starved. Because while his mother had loved him and had been always trying to do her best, there had still been only so much she could have even done for him, being a widow who had already lost her husband and two sons and then had had him out of wedlock. She had been shunned by everyone for it, even if Ryuzo hadn't quite been noticing that back when he'd been a child, everyone but the lords, that's it, and not without a reason.

There was no point dwelling on it right now though, he thought. 

Another dead samurai's body was already lying in the snow at his feet. They had both been very young and not particularly skilled. In a way they reminded Ryuzo of him and Jin years ago, minus the fact that between the two of them, only Jin had ever been a samurai. He hadn't really had a hard time killing them both. And this was how it was going to be from now on, he supposed, the price to pay for even being close to Jin, though now that Lord Shimura knew about him still being alive as well, he was going to be hunted in his own right, too, regardless of if he stayed with Jin or not, though maybe not to the extent that Jin was, because while he might have been a traitor once, he was no longer a particular threat to the very order on this island the way Jin was.

These samurai must have been sent here to look for them after the other ones had failed to return with their heads from Sago Mill and more must have been coming from where they'd come from. They needed to leave now, regardless of Jin even having anywhere else to go for real or not. It had taken Ryuzo a long time earlier to put Jin's forearm back together with the help of one of the women from the farmstead who had claimed to know how to take care of wounds and had brought some herbs with her and the result had been them staying in this place for far too long already.

The bodies had nothing interesting on them when Ryuzo checked, other than the arrows in their quivers. He took these, though he'd lost the bow that Jin had given him in Sago Mill. Jin still had his, though, and he could use these. Then he caught the samurai's horses to take their saddlebags, too. When he looked inside these, there was food there and full sake gourds attached. It all looked very promising and he wasn't going to let Jin give it all away as well. He'd earned it by killing those samurai, at the very least.

The thought made him shudder because he'd inadvertently reminded himself of the Khan and the kinds of things that he'd had to do to get food for his men back then. But this was still not the same as setting that man on fire in front of Castle Shimura's gates, those had been armed men coming for him and Jin with the orders to kill them and while Ryuzo could see the danger in killing samurai, he didn't exactly have the kind of qualms about it that Jin seemed to have. Because why should he? The samurai class had never endeared itself to him, besides maybe Jin and his father at times.

Ryuzo assumed that Jin would have been concerned about the women from the farmstead getting punished for those samurai’s deaths if their bodies were to be found here, so he went to the effort of attaching them to their horses, which he then sent running into the fields, and only once they were gone, he took the saddlebags and went to the house where he'd left Jin. Its shoji door and windows were full of holes but it had a working hearth and it was still nice and warm inside when he opened the door. He would have gladly stayed there longer, with Jin, but that was out of the question now.

Jin was waiting right behind the door. He had probably watched the whole fight and Ryuzo hoped that he'd liked what he'd seen. And thankfully, he hadn't tried intervening, because there was only so much his arm could have taken before it was going to get damaged beyond repair, which would have been both a death sentence for Jin and a loss of the best swordsman this island had ever had and probably was ever going to have, too.

Ryuzo dropped the saddlebags at Jin's feet and pulled him into a kiss, encountering no resistance at all, at least for as long as he didn't slide his cold hands under Jin's kimono on his chest. Jin was still wearing only his under armor garments, made of black silk, and the feel of it was almost as nice on Ryuzo's skin as the warmth of Jin's body. Too bad that Jin didn't let him enjoy himself for long. He moaned in protest and broke the kiss to push him away with his uninjured arm. 

"We need to leave," he said.

Ryuzo knew as much himself. But despite that, he wanted Jin on the floor, by that hearth, under him. The excitement of the earlier fight still hadn't left him and he would have gladly shared it with Jin now. Except that was out of the question, of course. 

Jin moved away and went to get his armor.

"What's this?" he asked when he started putting it on, motioning with his head to the saddlebags at Ryuzo's feet.

"Food. For us. You don't get to give it away."

"Fine, if it's a reasonable amount for two people." 

Jin didn't argue. Which was a good thing, Ryuzo thought, because he was not going back to eating his supplies from the Mongol camp now.

"Where do you want to go now?" he asked, even though Jin had kind of told him already. He hadn't given him any details though.

He didn't answer now either. He finished dressing but left the part of the armor that went over his injured forearm off entirely and headed toward the door once he was done.

"To Kin Sanctuary," he said only then. "You thought I changed my mind?"

"What for?"

Jin ignored that question again, walked by Ryuzo, opened the door and went outside.

Ryuzo followed him, taking the saddlebags with him.

"I behaved, didn't I?" he asked, now that they were facing the place where the fight had just taken place.

"You did," Jin agreed, though he frowned, as if he wasn't quite sure. 

Not that there had been any other choice, Ryuzo thought. Not at this point.

Jin walked up to where there was some blood left on the snow, the only thing remaining from the fight since the bodies were gone. He kneeled down and started moving the snow around so the marks would be covered. 

Frankly, the women from the farmstead could do that themselves, Ryuzo thought.

"That's twenty six of them," Jin said with his hand in the snow. "Give or take one or two. That we killed since yesterday. Mongols had killed eighty."

"Because there weren't any more than that here back then," Ryuzo pointed out, though he knew that this wasn't going to really change Jin's thinking. He could tell that Jin was going to treat that number as some kind of boundary that should never be crossed, even if there were enough samurai around here now for it to be possible to kill that many and not be anywhere near close to being done with them. Even more could still be sent here, too, though maybe in the end, Tsushima wasn't important enough for that.

But if they were ever really going to kill that many, or more than that, it was going to be impossible to keep Jin off his own blade at that point, Ryuzo thought. Jin had been fighting the Mongols in the first place for those eighty samurai who had died at Komoda after all.

Though on the other hand, there had been a time when he would have said that he was never going to become someone who had poisoned, dismembered and stealthily killed hundreds of people either. And yet here he was. Eighty was just a number in the end. Samurai hadn't been the only ones who had died at Komoda Beach, after all, not even taking into account all the other victims of the war. It was just that no one had ever been counting the Straw Hats and the others as meticulously and Jin himself never cared if he'd killed more of _them_ than the Mongols had.

"We should probably lay low for some time now," Ryuzo said, taking a hold of himself. 

It seemed like the only possible solution to him. Jin had to heal. And it was also going to keep them from being forced to kill whomever was going to pursue them again. After some time, things might have quietened down a bit.

"Go somewhere where we can rest," he continued.

He had only slept a little the past night and the night before that and also while he had been following Jin earlier and he was slowly getting to the point where he was going to just knock Jin out to be able to go to sleep for more than a moment anyway, even if that was also going to bring back some unpleasant memories for him. It would still be worth it. And Jin could use the rest as well, whatever it was that was keeping him from sleeping in the first place.

"Later," Jin said. He got to his feet and shook the snow off his hands.

"You had nowhere to go anymore before this morning," Ryuzo pointed out. "You had so very much nothing more to do, actually, that you said that you could well enough die."

"I know. But that has changed now."

"Because of something your uncle told you?" It must have been that, Ryuzo thought, unless Jin had gotten the idea from the Thief and the people whom she had shown up with. But then, he would have left with them.

"Yes."

"What was it? And why didn't it convince you to try to run away last night then, if it was so important?"

"It’s just about me, it's nothing very important in the grand scheme of things. And my uncle would have taken care of it for me if I had died. Except I'm not dead. And I promised Yuna I wouldn't die, not yet."

“You’re alive because you promised her you wouldn’t die?”

“She saved my life three times now. She should probably get a say. Besides, any trouble I'm in with the samurai, it's the same for her. And now that I met her, I know that she wouldn't have given up even if I was gone. I won't make her fight this fight alone."

"What if she will have a problem with me?" Ryuzo asked, because it seemed her opinion mattered a lot, more so than he would have expected.

"She will." Jin didn't say anything more than that.

"You and her, what are you two exactly?"

"Not something I wish to explain to you right now."

That didn't sound good at all.

"You said you loved me, Jin."

"That doesn't really invalidate what I owe her."

"She was happy when she learned that you'd killed me back during the war, wasn't she?" That was just a guess but Ryuzo couldn't have really imagined it having been any other way.

"She was." Jin nodded. "But she's also aware that there was someone in my past that I never got over. Anyway, there are some Kikuchis still alive, is what it is."

'Kikuchis,' Ryuzo thought, 'so what?' It was not likely that these were _men_ , if revenge for his father was what Jin wanted, now that he knew the truth, or at least what Lord Shimura had told him was the truth. There were limits to what kind of revenge even made sense, too. And it had been way too long since Jin's father's death for it to make any at this point. After all those years and the war, anyone actually somewhat responsible must have been dead already anyway and Lord Shimura had still killed the direct perpetrators right away.

"What do you want from them?" Ryuzo asked, warily. He felt like telling Jin to let go of his past at this point, but he stopped himself, because then, why would have Jin stuck by _him_?

Maybe he should even be grateful to Lord Shimura in the end for giving Jin a purpose again, he thought, though he really wasn't. He didn't like where this was going at all.

"I'll decide when we'll find them," Jin said.

"And how do you plan on finding them?"

"My uncle told me last night where some of them might be."

"He told you," Ryuzo repeated. Jin must have realized what that meant, right? "He'll be able to tell where we'll go." 

Jin didn't seem to be bothered by that at all.

"That's a recipe for disaster," Ryuzo observed.

The absolutely last thing they needed, he thought, was running into Lord Shimura again.

"I don’t think so," Jin said. "My uncle doesn't really hunt me down like that. Even if he figures out that I'll go there now, he'll let me be."

"Except it might be the moment when he starts." Those twenty six dead samurai might have changed things, Ryuzo thought. And Jin should be taking that into account in that case.

"Even if he does start... You think I’m afraid?”

No, of course Jin wasn't, Ryuzo thought.

When Jin started walking away, clearly heading to their horses and intending to leave, Ryuzo followed him, thinking how he might have really bitten off more here in the end than he could chew.

"You want a repeat of last night, Jin?" he asked when Jin got onto his horse. "You will be executed right away this time around, if they have learnt anything."

"I'm not a samurai. That's how it should be anyway."

"But it's not how it has to be."

“And I hope nothing like that will happen. You don’t have to go with me, though.”

"I will go with you." Ryuzo started to transfer the contents of the samurai's saddlebags into his own. "It's just that…"

"When you came to me, what did you expect anyway?" Jin asked from his horse. "Things to be _easy_? Between us? Or overall?" 

"You to be a bit more reasonable, maybe." Ryuzo got on his horse as well once he was done with the saddlebags.

"If I was, you would have been dead now."

'Yes', Ryuzo thought to himself. He was aware that it was Jin's sorry state after everything he had been through during the war that had let him get close to him again in the first place, but now, he would have preferred it not ending up killing them both, too.

"After whatever you are planning to do, what are you going to do next?" he asked. "Go to Jogaku Temple, finally? Make some decisions about what you're even going to do? With the samurai?"

"Didn't you want to rest first?" 

"After we rest." 

"I'll go there then. But we'll see if you will still want to follow me around at that point."

Was that Jin's new strategy, Ryuzo wondered. Discouraging him?

"You doubt that?" he asked. "You killed all my men. You pretty much killed me as well. And then you tried that again this very morning. Yet I'm still here. What are you going to do that could change my mind? Murder all those Kikuchis? Even if they're just women and children?"

"That's something that would have bothered you so badly?" Jin asked, as if he hadn’t been expecting that at all. "You've never done anything like that yourself?" 

“No.” Ryuzo hadn't. Not that he would have just confessed if he had. But in the end, the worst he'd done had been burning that one man alive. He used to have standards about what kind of work he had been willing to take before the war. "You?"

Jin hesitated.

"I wonder," he said, looking away, "to what extent all those people in Kin that the Mongols poisoned because of me are on me. All the people they must have killed to retaliate for the Ghost's actions elsewhere, too."

"Those are not on you. They did it, not you."

"With my own hands then? I killed a woman in a duel during the invasion. She was a Yarikawa samurai. She gave me no choice with how much she hated me. It was either her or me. But only I could defeat the Mongols." 

With how heavy that alone seemed to weigh on Jin, it didn't seem likely that he was really planning to go on some murdering spree now.

"Your girl," Ryuzo said, suddenly pretty sure it was that. "The one whom you once wanted to marry."

Jin looked at him again.

"She was a Kikuchi, wasn’t she?" Ryuzo continued. "Is that it? You want to look for her?"

What for, Ryuzo wondered. Now that Jin knew what the problem with that marriage had been, he should just be grateful. For once, Lord Shimura had done him a favor, stopping him from marrying a woman from a clan that had murdered his father. Maybe precisely for that reason.

"Let her be," Ryuzo said. "They have probably married her off to someone else a long time ago anyway. What do you want from her at this point?"

"Why does it bother you so badly that I want to look for her?”

Ryuzo realized he really had said quite a lot, without even getting any confirmation from Jin in the first place. But it was turning out he had been right.

“It's not likely that they have married her off, actually,” Jin said. “And maybe I… It has been months since I killed the Khan and yet I still haven’t really tried to find her."

"Why should you?"

"You'll see for yourself.”

Ryuzo had assumed that at least that had been over, that having no title and no estate anymore, Jin had no use for heirs or a wife anymore either.

"You think she’s in danger?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"If she is, will you make me fight for her sake? And then you'll ride off into the sunset with her?"

"You're jealous?"

"Actually, yes."

"Good. A feeling I know pretty well from having been with you."

Ryuzo's hands tightened around the reins of his horse. Jin was never going to understand _why_ he had had to be like that back then, was he?

When he didn't say anything more, Jin turned away and rode off, leaving him behind.

Ryuzo followed him after a while, though he made no actual effort to catch up to him and continue talking with him. He now liked where this was going even less.

Jin headed toward another river, which was going to lead them all the way to Kin Sanctuary, as far as Ryuzo could remember. 

It was well past noon at this point and the shadows were already getting long. But the days were actually no longer as short as back in the middle of winter and at least at midday, even this far north, the air faintly smelled of incoming spring. 

With the excitement of the earlier fight dissipating entirely at this point, Ryuzo was starting to discover how exhausted he really was. Everything around him was turning into a white blur, the blue ribbon of the river the only non-white thing in the entire landscape. 

"Lord Sakai!"

Someone calling Jin's name woke Ryuzo up, actually, and he nearly fell from his horse, only then realizing that he'd fallen asleep at all.

There was a warrior monk across their path now, waving his arms, trying to catch their attention. 

Jin stopped his horse in front of him.

"Lord Sakai," the monk addressed him.

Jin nodded in acknowledgment.

Ryuzo had seen Jin fight alongside warrior monks back during the war, when he'd been with the Mongols, and it wasn't entirely unexpected that some of them must have known him but he himself had never had anything to do with them.

"We heard that your supporters were coming from the north to assist you in Sago Mill," the monk said. "When the news reached Cedar Temple this morning, Norio set off with a group of monks as well, but when he reached Sago Mill, you were no longer there. And since some of us are staying here, he and the others came to see us before they leave for Cedar Temple again. They were just leaving, too..."

"Norio's here?" Jin asked, getting off his horse.

The monk nodded. 

“If you hurry, that's it, my lord,” he said.

"Let's go then." 

"I'll wait here," Ryuzo spoke up.

He assumed that Jin didn't want him to be seen by these people. And he decided to clean his sword while at it before Jin got on his case again about him not maintaining his weapons correctly.

"Come along," Jin addressed him instead.

The monk looked between the two of them. 

Ryuzo hesitated, but dismounted his horse. He had wanted Jin to let his supporters know about him, eventually, even if he had run away from Sago Mill before they could have seen him there. That had been during a fight though and he might have just gotten killed no questions asked. But now, this seemed a bit sudden to him, too.

"You're sure?" he asked.

"You've gotten afraid?" Jin looked at him, offering no explanation to the monk. "Again?"

"No." 

"Then let's go," Jin said.

The monk nodded and led the way.

They went up stone stairs leading to a group of buildings that seemed to be some kind of barracks. There were more warrior monks up there, keeping warm in small circles around several fires. A bigger group of them on horseback was just leaving, presumably for Cedar Temple.

The one leading them hopped off his horse as soon as he saw Jin.

“Lord Sakai!” he exclaimed right away.

Younger than them, he seemed excited to see Jin to a degree that Ryuzo wouldn't have expected and he was looking at Jin with an admiration that was frankly unnerving. Though he should probably just get used to that, all things considered.

“Jin," Jin corrected the monk. "I'm not going to correct everyone who calls me 'Lord Sakai', but I don't need my friends calling me that when I’m no longer a lord."

“We were just in Sago Mill,” the monk said.

"I already explained it to Lord Sakai," the other monk spoke up.

"We need to talk, Norio," Jin said.

Norio sent the other monks away, until the three of them were alone, with no one else within earshot.

"You know who that is?" Jin asked, motioning toward Ryuzo.

"No." Norio shook his head.

"The Straw Hats leader who betrayed me back during the war. His name's Ryuzo. I defeated him at Castle Shimura and we thought he was dead. But he survived somehow."

Ryuzo wasn't sure if he was supposed to say anything at all himself after an introduction like that.

"I've already heard about him being alive," After taking a good look at Ryuzo's face, Norio looked back to Jin. "The samurai we met at Sago Mill were looking for him as well. I wouldn't have expected both of you to be travelling together, though."

"I'm trying to find out if he can be useful to us," Jin said.

Norio nodded, not questioning that at all. Considering the way he was looking at Jin, it seemed he wouldn’t have questioned anything Jin might have done.

“You talked to the samurai?" Jin asked. "In Sago Mill? Did you run into any trouble there?”

"No." Norio shook his head. "They are not hostile to us. Even though some of them must know by now that we are loyal to the Ghost and not to them. When we went to Sago Mill, we told them that we’d heard of the disturbance there and came to see what had happened. They accepted that explanation, whatever they were thinking we were really there for."

"I’m glad you didn't show up earlier and participate in that fight, too," Jin said. "I wouldn't have wanted you getting involved.”

“Why?” Norio asked. "We arrived to help."

“I don't want you fighting them," Jin answered. "Once they send someone here to rule Sago, let them. And listen to their orders.”

"Their orders were to inform them immediately of your whereabouts, Jin," Norio pointed out.

"You can do that." Jin nodded. "I don't mind. Once we leave, you can go back to them and tell them that me and Ryuzo have passed through here, if that will earn you their goodwill. I don't expect your loyalty anymore. I have no right to it, in fact. And I don't even want it."

The monk seemed to be quite perplexed by that.

"We won the war by being loyal to you," he said. "While most of _them_ weren't even here back then. Certainly not to save my brother. Or the other Cedar Temple monks. But they're here now to rule."

"Someone has to," Jin sounded absolutely sure of that.

Jin knew a thing or two about that, didn't he, Ryuzo thought to himself. 

“People will not accept them, though," Norio said. "Not like that."

"They'll have no choice," Jin insisted. "Siding with me instead at this point will only bring them hardship. So convince them. You're a monk. You must strive for peace. And have you seen what I had to do in Sago Mill already?"

"Kill some samurai?" Norio asked. "Is that what you mean? We've seen the bodies there. But I don't doubt that you only did what was necessary."

"There is always another way, Norio," Jin said. "It’s just that I've gotten used to taking shortcuts."

Ryuzo was starting to wonder what was even the point in him listening in to this conversation.

"I shouldn't have done that, though," Jin continued "That and what I did in Fort Kaminodake. It seemed to me at the time that I didn't have a choice. And that I could just stop that then, before things got out of hand. But the way it's going, it will get even worse than that. And I don't know how to stop it, other than by disappearing entirely and convincing everyone else to give up."

"Is that what you're doing?" Norio asked. "You, Jin? It was you who told me that I do not get to give up after I had avenged my brother in ways not befitting of a monk. That I had to stay one. Because I was still needed."

"You are," Jin said. "I'm not. Not anymore. And neither do I fit into this new order that those samurai have brought here.”

"Maybe that's what's wrong with that order," Norio argued. "The Mongols will come back, too, eventually, is what I’ve heard. What about then?"

"I did think we should have been preparing for that," Jin agreed. "I just spent a month in a Mongol camp trying to learn everything there was to learn there to be ready for them, but a civil war now won't make us stronger. And who will be even willing to listen to me anyway? It seems the shogunate plans to rely on my uncle's experience."

'Doing what,' Ryuzo thought, 'losing all his troops?'

"That won't be enough, though," Norio said. "And people believe in the Ghost. They think you will save them."

"They believe in fairy tales." Jin shrugged. "They expect me to sail to China now with my army to defeat the Mongols there. Or to make them free from the rule of the samurai and to abolish all their taxes. Even if I was to try ruling part of Tsushima now, how would that have worked like that? The sooner they forget all about that, the better. My uncle's still the jito. They should believe in him again now, not in me. You can tell them as much."

The chances of anyone believing those words were pretty low, though, Ryuzo thought, considering that Jin had spent the past few days clearly opposing and killing samurai himself. 

On the other hand, nothing short of Lord Shimura actually taking Jin's head and parading it around the whole island for everyone to see could have convinced most of the people at this point that they should really look up to the jito again more so than to the Ghost. And that must have been precisely the reason why Jin had wanted his uncle to have it.

"I can tell them that," Norio said, "but they won't believe me anyway. All the time, we’re hearing of men heading to Jogaku Temple to join the Ghost's army. That's what they believe."

"I've met those, too." Jin nodded. "And I wish they wouldn't do that."

"But they are not coming back either, Jin," Norio pointed out. "And it's not even far from here."

"I think Yuna is letting them stay there," Jin said.

"Then, what about them if you were really to surrender?" Norio asked. "And about everyone else at Jogaku Temple?"

"Maybe most of them could just go back to where they came from." Jin sounded tired at this point. "There are refugees there, too, but the samurai shouldn’t target them. I still have to talk to Yuna. But regardless of what will even happen there in the end, I don't want you to get involved. You have to give me your word, Norio. That even if all of us were to be slaughtered there, you won't try helping us. And that you will let it go."

Norio opened his mouth to respond but Ryuzo stopped him.

"Except that's not what's going to happen," he spoke up. 

Both Jin and Norio looked at him.

"It's not about him choosing to intervene or not, Jin," Ryuzo continued. "They will be ordered to fight you themselves, if they claim they'll respect the rule of the samurai. Because there will be no better way to test their loyalty. Think about what you're going to do then." 

"That won't be necessary," Norio said right away. "Because we won't follow those kinds of orders. Never. And nobody can make us. We'd all rather die."

\---

They left after that, with Jin refusing the monks' offers of food and rest. He was visibly distressed after having talked to Norio. And then they were on the road again, in silence. Maybe they were even going to make it to Kin Sanctuary before nightfall at this pace, Ryuzo thought, though there wasn't much to look up to there either.

Eventually, by still following the river, they reached the place where the trees under the snow turned barren and grey. Burned down. The wind was carrying ashes from that direction. 

Jin decided to stop right there and light a fire. They were both wearing furs but as it was getting later in the day, the cold was becoming unbearable anyway.

"You did not help me there," Jin spoke up, crouching down in front of the fire to warm up his hands.

Ryuzo sat down opposite him, with the fire a barrier between them. He wondered if he should take out some food but Jin wasn't asking for it or making any move to get it himself. In the end, Ryuzo settled on taking out a gourd of sake.

"You took me along to talk to that monk," he observed, "and then you expected me to just stand around and listen?"

"Pretty much, yes. During that part. I wanted to ask him what he had to say about forgiveness next."

"Because what?" Ryuzo took a swig of the sake. "You can't decide for yourself if you want to forgive me or not. You must know what he would have said anyway. You must have read about it already once, right?"

"It might have still helped us."

"You'll take care of your spiritual needs at some other time, Jin. For now, think about that war that you're not going to be able to avoid and how to win it. Because even if you die, some of the people who are on your side won't be deterred even by that. You just won't be around to see it then. And it will happen at this point regardless of what you may do."

"You sound as if you wanted it to happen."

Ryuzo continued drinking. The alcohol in his stomach at least gave him the illusion of warmth.

"Why not?" he asked. "If you could end up holding part of Tsushima, you'd at least be rewarded for your efforts during the war with something better than getting beheaded by your uncle."

"And if I'll keep you around that long, you'll be rewarded along with me. That's why you're even here. Because there's nothing better for you to invest your effort into anymore." Jin stood up, as if he intended to leave already.

Ryuzo stayed where he was for a moment longer, until he finished the sake and got to his feet as well. He walked up to Jin and reached out his hand to touch his face but Jin caught it and stopped him. He didn't let go of it, though.

"I'm here," Ryuzo spoke up, "because what I once told you about us having no future together is no longer true. We can have it, if you want it."

Jin's hold on his hand started tightening, almost to the point it was painful.

"If I betray everyone first," Jin said. "My father was murdered by bandits in front of me, because of rebels' plotting. My first kill was a traitor from Yarikawa who had tried to assassinate Lord Shimura in front of me. And now I'm supposed to become like them. No wonder my ancestors stopped talking to me..."

"They're dead, Jin. Let them be." 

Ryuzo wondered why Lord Shimura had chosen this specific moment to tell Jin about that whole 'rebels' plotting' behind his father's death, too. Because maybe _this_ was precisely what he wanted Jin to think. 

He pulled Jin's hand to his lips. The top of it was covered in armor, the metal radiating coldness. He still kissed it. 

"What are you talking about anyway?" he asked. "What about your allies? Are they rebels, too? And you have actually made that decision a while ago already. When you stopped fighting by the samurai's rules in the first place. I can see that you're tired, Jin. But we can do this, eventually. And correct me if I'm wrong but I've heard that you're well liked in Yarikawa itself now."

"Yes." Jin nodded. He pulled his hand away from Ryuzo's hold but at least he stayed where he was, within arm's reach. "Yarikawa was a big help during the war, actually. Those people who saved us in Sago Mill, most of them were archers from Yarikawa, too. They're good men. And they ended up in Jogaku Temple as well."

"And they didn't hesitate to come bail you out. So, does your loyalty lie with them, or with those newly arrived samurai? A bunch of cowards who only showed up once it was safe here?"

Jin took a step back. So much for him staying close, Ryuzo thought.

"At about the same time when you decided to crawl out from wherever you had been hiding, too," Jin said. "It was not safe arriving here by sea before. And I'd rather not discuss loyalty with you. Because you don't know what it is."

"Because what? I went to the Mongols? I already told you I'd done it for my men."

"You have already managed to go to those people sent here to hunt me down, too. And even if you had done it for your men back then, you all just died as a result. On the wrong side. What makes you think it will end differently now?"

"None of us were you."

It was as simple as that, Ryuzo thought. Jin still had his doubts but the samurai side was probably only one wrong move away now anyway from targeting the wrong person and unleashing him on itself for real.

Jin turned on his heel and went to get his horse. Ryuzo followed him. They moved along but the horses didn't seem eager to go into the burned down forest. 

The road to Kin Sanctuary in front of them, which would have been full of pilgrims moving in both directions before the war, even in the winter and this close to sunset, was completely empty now. It was just them.

"I didn't like the way that monk was looking at you," Ryuzo spoke up because he didn't like the eerie silence that had engulfed them in the burned down forest at all. All the animals must have preferred to stay away from it, so nothing besides their horses was making any noise. "As if you could stomp on him and he'd be happy about that."

Jin actually snorted.

"Whatever you imagine," he said, "it's not like that. He's my friend. And one of the people I 'inspired' in the worst sense of the word back during the war."

" 'Inspired'? "

"His brother, the Guardian, had been tortured and killed by the Mongols. Norio wanted to avenge him. I offered to do that for him, so he wouldn't have to, but he only agreed for me to help him and didn't tell me how the Mongol whom he wanted dead looked like. And when we went to fight him together, Norio left the camp at night while I was asleep and slaughtered that Mongol and his companions all on his own, burned most of them alive..."

Ryuzo flinched at the mere mention of burning anyone alive but he hoped that Jin didn't notice that while they were on horseback. 

That was a bit unexpected though, he had to admit, because he wouldn't have told at first glance that that monk could have been capable of doing something like that.

"Then he told me that it was what the Ghost would have done," Jin added.

"Wasn't it?" Ryuzo had seen enough of Jin's victims at this point to know that that monk probably hadn't been _wrong_.

"I was doing what I was doing back during the war so others wouldn't have to. And if Norio had actually gotten killed then, I might have never slept again at all."

'Seriously?', Ryuzo thought. He couldn't really understand why Jin was still barely sleeping months later over such a relatively minor incident anyway. 

"That's a bit overdramatic, don't you think?" he asked.

Jin ignored that.

"I was already doing my best not to sleep much when I was alone during the war before then," he continued, "just because there was nobody there to watch my back most of the time. I hoped it could have been you…"

So, Jin had done it to himself with the vigilance, Ryuzo thought. It was better than getting murdered in one's sleep by some wandering Mongol patrol, he supposed, with their dogs and their hawks, but in the end, at what cost.

"I still let myself sleep around my allies back then," Jin said, "when I was with them, until then, that's it. And also…" 

"What?"

"I guess there's no harm in telling you that, even though you may think it sounds stupid. My previous horse let me curl up next to it and sleep like that, too. It felt as if it was watching over me then. Good enough for me. But it was killed when I was fleeing Castle Shimura. Its grave is around here, actually. It took a lot of effort to dig it up, even if it was barely deep enough to hide its body at all, and I should have been in a hurry. But I couldn't just leave it like that."

Contrary to what Jin seemed to think, it was not that Ryuzo thought that this was stupid, rather, it was a bit… insensitive.

"Do you want to hear the story of how I was digging graves for the Straw Hats you killed, too?" he asked. "A lot of work, you know. Good thing I don't believe in talking to the dead, too. Because they might have told me to slit your throat at the first opportunity."

'A damned _horse_ ', Ryuzo thought to himself. At least Jin stayed quiet about how his men had deserved that.

"You can't sleep at all since then?" he asked, once he got a hold of himself.

"No, not for more than a moment at a time."

"We'll have to do something about that. Or do you think you can just go on like that indefinitely?"

"You already know I don't think that at all, Ryuzo. But another war is not what I need."

"You won't be alone this time around."

"We'll see about that. And if it will actually make anything better in the end."

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there was actually no Kin Sanctuary in this chapter yet but oh well lol (since that farmstead next to Sago Mill and the barracks around there with the warrior monks don't have names, I kind of didn't have a choice).


End file.
